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By David Peterson at May 16, 2005 |
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"Largest ever Rainbow Sash celebration at the Cathedral of St. Paul," Rainbow Sash Alliance USA, May 15, 2005 "St. Paul Catholics denied communion for wearing sashes to support gays," Joshua Freed, Associated Press, May 16, 2005 "No communion for 150 in sashes at cathedral," John Reinan, Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 16, 2005For more on the Rainbow Sash Movement, which started in Australia and now has spread to Britain and the States, see:
Rainbow Sash Alliance USA (Homepage) "Protesting gays denied Communion," Dennis Coday, National Catholic Reporter, June 18, 2004As for the Church of Rome's doctrinal negations of our humanity, well, I've already provided a link to one testament to it above ("attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition and the Church's Magisterium," as they like to say in Rome):
Catechism of the Catholic Church, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Interdicasterial Commission, 1994Of course, a lot more ought to be said about all of this. It goes without saying. ("For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever.") By the way, Terence mentions that today, May 18, marks Bertrand Russell's birthday. So I suppose it's a better day than most to drop a quote from Russell who, late in life (1961), had this to say about his life's work:
Philosophical progress seems to me analogous to the gradually increasing clarity of outline of a mountain approached through mist, which is vaguely visible at first, but even at last remains in some degree indistinct. What I have never been able to accept is that the mist itself conveys valuable elements of truth. There are those who think that clarity, because it is difficult and rare, should be suspect. The rejection of this view has been the deepest impulse in all my philosophical work.Postscript (May 19): Stealing Jesus---a great title. We might extend this line of criticism a little further: Bogarting Buddha, for example. Sometimes, a friend of mine asks me to imagine how Jesus would have fared in one of today's Christian dungeons. Of course, I dismiss the notion that much of anything is known about a real flesh-and-blood person putatively going by the name Jesus. But, at least sticking to the amalgem-like character portrayed in the four Gospels, her point is absolutely sound: This Jesus clearly wouldn't fare too well. The larger point being: The leftist, libertarian, and liberal character depicted therein is nothing like the tool assumed by each of today's Christian churches. Zeroing in on the Church of Rome: The Jesus depicted in the four Gospels is very much a heretic by today's regnant dogma. Both non-dictatorial and a relativist at one and the same time. Contrary to the now-unchallengeable formulation of the learned Pope Benedict XVI---i.e., "dictatorship of relativism," in his exact words. For Christ's sake!
Stealing Jesus, Bruce Bawer, Crown Publishers, Inc., 1997Postscript (May 23): Reporting on the recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study, Buzz, Blogs and Beyond, the New York Times's Tom Zeller Jr. wondered what the "most crucial factor contributing to blog influence" might be. The title of Zeller's May 23 article suggests one answer. "Are Bloggers Setting the Agenda?" it asked. And then answered: "It Depends on the Scandal." Not a bad first approximation. But now observe how badly Zeller's account of the agenda-setting process trips and falls over its own two feet:
Still, on issues like Iraq, weapons of mass destruction or the military draft, the Pew study found the chatter profile to be mixed, with buzz originating from several information channels. In instances in which blogs took the lead, such as the mysterious bulge that appeared on President Bush's back during the first debate (a radio receiver, some liberal blogs posited), they were often unable to get other channels to follow. The CBS News scandal, in which the network based a critical report on President Bush on what turned out to be forged Vietnam-era documents relating to his National Guard days, was another story. In that case, the researchers suggest, the conditions for a broad-based scandal - and potent blog buzz - were ripe. Although left and right diverged on theories of who might have been behind the fake memos, there was broad agreement that political dirty tricks were involved, and the blogosphere lighted up with detective work and theorizing. The high name recognition of CBS News and Dan Rather helped, as did the fact that the network and the anchor initially defended the memos, creating grand targets for the longbowmen of the blogosphere. And both the timing and the high stakes made for fertile buzz territory. "This was not a cold or distant case," the study suggests. "The election was weeks away, and the candidates' service records during the Vietnam War had been a major topic of discussion for months." For all that, though, the most crucial factor contributing to blog influence in that issue may have been the smoking gun: digital copies of the 1970's-era documents and their impossibly modern fonts. These became powerful totems because they could be relentlessly examined, tinkered with, traded and discussed online by blogs of all political stripes, each with its own agenda and each contributing to a buzz that ultimately could not be ignored. In the absence of such a totem, the ability to generate buzz in the blogosphere, at least for now, appears diminished. (That may change as the number of blogs - now at 10 million, according to the blog search firm Technorati - continues to grow.) Applying the same methodology last week to the recent Newsweek crisis, in which an apparently incorrect item reporting desecration of a Koran by American military interrogators sparked riots abroad and claims of journalistic incompetence (and political bias) at home, the researchers found blog buzz much slower to develop, despite widespread coverage in the mainstream media. Why? Perhaps because there was no smoking gun to pass around.We need to modify what Zeller was saying here quite a bit further. In U.S. society (or any class-ridden, hierarchical society you care to name), who or what sets the major agendas: The common folk---or the "privileged groups that dominate domestic society and the state," as Herman and Chomsky expressed the matter in their 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent? The case is closed on this question, as best I can tell. Elites set the major agendas. The masses either follow their leads or sink into silence and irrelevancy. The same truth holds for blogging---though the reason has nothing to do with blogging per se. Within the political culture, the academic institutions, the communications media and, last but not least, the Internet and the so-called "blogosphere," in all of which various and competing agendas are articulated and contested daily, under what circumstances will the very last, the bloggers, the common folk of the system, be heard? (And notice that I am excluding Internet sites and blogs managed by elite sectors.) On February 5, 2003, none of the elite sectors of U.S. society wanted to hear that the regime in Baghdad possessed no "weapons of mass destruction" and no ties to Al Qaeda---and one-million bloggers marching in alternative directions weren't going to convince them otherwise. In the final analysis, it is not the blog, the medium, or the technology that ever takes or follows the lead in anything. Rather, it is elite sectors that always have the lead. And insofar as a specific medium such as blogging is concerned, it all depends on what the bloggers are saying, when they are saying it, and above all on whether anybody who really matters wants to hear it.
Buzz, Blogs and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004, Michael Cornfield et al., Pew Internet and American Life Project, May, 2005 "Are Bloggers Setting the Agenda? It Depends on the Scandal," Tom Zeller Jr., New York Times, May 23, 2005Postscript (May 29): The online version of an article in today's Chicago Sun-Times about the Mary of the Underpass ("Apparitions of Mary leave lasting impression," Lisa Donovan, May 29) also provides a partial catalogue of some of the "reported religious apparitions in the Chicago area" over the past 25 years---those "statues, paintings and icons that appear to weep or move, and images, shapes or shadows that appear on walls, windows and---most recently---the underpass wall of the Kennedy Expressway, at Fullerton." Quite some list of epiphanies, no doubt about it.
* 2001: A scar on a tree trunk at Rogers Park was thought to be an image of Mary. The tree is gone, neighbors say, but the shrine still sits at Honore and Rogers where fresh flowers and lighted candles are evidence of its perpetual adoration. * 1999: In Joliet, a shadowy outline of Mary is seen in the second-story window of a house at 611 Abe St. * 1994: In Cicero, drops of moisture that look like tears stream down the cheeks of an icon of Mary at St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church, 1220 S. 60th Ct. The icon becomes famous as Our Lady of Cicero. * 1991: At Queen of Heaven Cemetery, 1400 S. Wolf Rd. in Hillside, a retired railroad worker says he saw a large fiberglass crucifix bleed in the veterans section. So many people come to see the crucifix, some of them trampling over or driving on graves, that the cemetery has to move the crucifix and create a special parking lot for it. Today, the crowds are gone, but the icon still draws the faithful, a spokeswoman said. * 1986: At Nicholas Albanian Orthodox Churchm 2701 N. Narragansett on Chicago's Northwest Side, a painting of Mary begins to weep on the saint's name day. The church opens its doors for veneration of the icon on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. * June 1984: At St. John of God Catholic Church on the Southwest Side, a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary appears to shed tears. The Archdiocese of Chicago investigates the phenomenon for more than a year before announcing it could not positively rule out natural causes for the liquid oozing from the wood.And this is the same American general public whose state drives all nuclear weapons questions for the entire world, refuses to consider dismantling its pre-eminent nuclear weapons program, despite its Article VI requirements under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and still prepares (perhaps---though it certainly like to make threats along these lines) to sponsor or itself to launch military attacks on any number of Iranian nuclear facilities, on the grounds that the Allah-fearing Iranians are simply too crazy and too dangerous to be permitted to possess a nuclear program, regardless of its purpose?
"America's broken nuclear promises endanger us all," Robin Cook, The Guardian, May 27, 2005Postscript (May 29): Am posting here the entirety of a superb article in today's New York Times: Laura Mansnerus' "Stoking ‘Moral Panic' Over Sex Offenders" (May 27, 2005)---though The Viagra Scare would have made a better title. (Sorry that I can't provide a link to it.) Where Mansnerus writes that, “As embodiments of evil go, sex offenders are better than terrorists,” cites Philip Jenkins' book, Moral Panic, and sarcastically asks, “who could oppose another restriction on a group considered undeserving of the constitutional protections that apply to everybody else?”---take it to heart. And whereas it is appalling that the American crime, punishment, and political image-making process benefits from "conspicuous vigilance in this area" (Jenkins), including the hysterical, march-in-lockstep news media, consider how much more represensible it is when leftist websites pander to the same sort of scares.
The New York Times May 29, 2005 Sunday Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 14NJ; Column 5; New Jersey Weekly Desk; ON POLITICS; Pg. 2 HEADLINE: Stoking 'Moral Panic' Over Sex Offenders BYLINE: By Laura Mansnerus. Laura Mansnerus reports from Trenton for The New York Times. With the state trying to find a few billion dollars for a budget that must be wrapped up in a month, the state treasurer, John E. McCormac, has a crushing schedule these days. That goes for his staff, too. But last week, Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey handed Mr. McCormac another task: make sure that no registered sex offenders on state-subsidized prescription plans are charging taxpayers for Viagra. On the same day, Mr. Codey announced a plan to track high-risk sex offenders after their release from prison with global positioning system technology. At a news conference, he was accompanied by the attorney general and five legislators. For their part, legislators were not just fuming by way of press release at the news of sex offenders on Viagra, but clamoring for legislation imposing a mandatory 25-year prison sentence for sexual assaults on minors. So despite the avalanche of legislative business, lawmakers were suddenly dwelling on unidentified enemies of the state. Perhaps it was not despite the press of business in Trenton -- but because of it -- that they wanted to summon some outrage about something else. To begin, The Star-Ledger of Newark had just reported that the state has lost track of many of the sex offenders who are supposed to be on its Internet registry. And budget season always opens elected officials to criticism that New Jersey's government is overpopulated and underperforming, able to provide jobs and contracts to friends while falling short on things like child welfare. But promoting child welfare by punishing sex offenders will not raise any taxes, and will appeal to everyone but a few civil libertarians. Just as no one could vote against something called Megan's law, who could oppose another restriction on a group considered undeserving of the constitutional protections that apply to everybody else? As embodiments of evil go, sex offenders are better than terrorists -- and apparently much easier to deal with, to judge from the state's spotty efforts, in the four years since the Sept. 11 attacks, to secure its ports and nuclear and chemical plants. The Viagra scare was not brought on by any real event but by a report from the comptroller in New York State that an audit of Medicaid rolls there had found Viagra prescriptions for about 200 men who had been convicted of serious sex offenses. This story of unintended consequences provided absurdity that the news media could hardly resist, and it led to a few days of too-vivid analogies like giving guns to paroled muggers or cigarette lighters to arsonists. The federal government quickly told the states to stop the Medicaid reimbursements. Nonetheless, the article stoked what sociologists call a ''moral panic'' about sex offenders. In a book titled ''Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America,'' Philip Jenkins, who teaches history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, argues that the 1990's raised exaggerated horrors of pedophiles as the 1980's did of crack mothers. And when fear of sex crimes grew, Professor Jenkins said, ''politicians at local and national levels benefited from conspicuous vigilance in this area.'' New Jersey politicians have been nothing if not conspicuously vigilant. They started a national wave of registration laws in the mid-1990's, after the horrific murder of Megan Kanka, for whom Megan's law is named, in Hamilton Township. They also authorized the involuntary commitment of sex offenders who have completed their prison terms. And for the approximately 200 released high-risk offenders who are not locked up for life, New Jersey legislators are almost certain to approve electronic monitoring. The next step in the bidding war beckons. The experts who say that fear of child molesters is overblown do not say that child molestation is not a serious problem. And it may just be coincidence that the gathering wave of indignation over sex offenders comes when the state has so many other problems. But most of the other problems are boring, like the state's staggering pension obligations, or insoluble, like the never-ending rise in property taxes, or too expensive to remedy, like child poverty. These require a lot of work that will not be discussed at news conferences or publicly assigned to cabinet officers. Of course, as he prepared to face the Assembly budget committee last week, Mr. McCormac was not personally combing the Medicaid rolls for sex offenders signed up for drugs that the television ads say will lead to happy marriages. Employees at the Department of Human Services did that, finding that the state contributed $12,000 to $15,ooo for Viagra for 55 convicted sex offenders over the last 18 months. (For other people's Viagra, the state spent $3.9 million.) They did it very quickly, because they know what's important.Postscript (May 30): If the "Global War on Terror" ever loses its propagandistic appeal, or if the Quran-idolatrists among the ACLU and Amnesty International succeed in their efforts at weakening our Homeland's defenses, perhaps the regime in Washington could launch a Global War on Sexual Predators instead? (Having already launched one domestically, don't forget. And having enlisted in the cause the Church of the Traumatized Americans---which, in terms of sheer numbers, is the single largest denomination in the States today. And still growing.) And if, perchance, the regime in Washington ever does take up a new crusade against Sexual Predators globally, what percentage of the American Left do you suppose will enlist in it? Using the performance of the American Left during the 1990s' Wars of Humanitarian Intervention as the basis for your estimate, do you suppose it will be closer to 10 percent? Closer to 50 percent? Or closer to 90 percent? And, before I let you go, one last question: How long do you suppose it will take before Harvard's Carr Center on Human Rights Policy offers new post-graduate studies in the Global War on Sexual Predators among in its Program Areas?
National Predator Report ("Be Aware. Be Alert. Be Safe.") Prepared remarks of the Atorney General Alberto R. Gonzales at the National Press Club, U.S. Department of Justice, May 20, 2005 "Justice Department Plans Registry of Sex Offenders," Dan Eggen, Washington Post, May 21, 2005 Government Documents on Torture (Homepage), American Civil Liberties Union "United States of America," Amnesty International Report 2005 (Homepage)Postscript (June 1): Check out the wonderful little list billed as the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries" (Human Events Online, May 31, 2005). "Human Events asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries," the introduction relays. Curiously, the fifth most harmful book, according to the panel, was John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916). The explanation for the honor is worth quoting here: Dewey's "views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation." Huh? And on top of this: One of the two C-SPAN cable TV channels in the States hosted a program with the editor of Human Events. The topic of discussion: That lunatic list they just published of the ten "most harmful" books of the 19th and 20th centuries. As a friend of mine pointed out, it really was too bad that Human Events didn't extend its list back as far as the 18th Century. This way, its esteemed panel of 15 "conservatives" could have voted to include the Bill or Rights and the Declaration of the Righs of Man. Postscript (June 2): A really dirty smear of Noam Chomsky aired on the Showtime cable television channel in the States the other day, one installment in the Penn & Teller team's ongoing series Bullshit!:
"College," Penn & Teller, Showtime, May 30, 2005Over the years, Penn & Teller have done magic, comedy, satire, social commentary, and the like---Showtime's promotional webpage for the Bullshit series refers to them as "renowned master showmen." What is striking is that the May 30 show relied heavily on figures such as David Horowitz (a hardcore Chomsky-hater whose FrontPageMagazine.com is part a defense of American Power and part madness, and whose Campus Watch is at the forefront of bringing Gestapo-like tactics to bear against America's universities and colleges), Alan Charles Kors (chairman of the Foundation for Individual Rights in America and a co-author of The Shadow University), and similar luminaries of the American Right to attack various straw-man theses about the college life and the threats to intellectual freedom---but from a decidedly David Horowitz- and Campus Watch-point of view. Penn & Teller's "College" defended the thesis that campuses today are "treacherous minefields where free speech and individual liberty often get trampled" (here quoting the promotional webpage that Showtime posts for Penn & Teller's Bullshit series). But the "treacherous minefields" of Penn & Teller's program aren't the serious and highly publicized crackdowns on academic freedoms we've witnessed in the cases of Joseph Massad et al. (Columbia University, New York) or Ward Churchill (University of Colorado at Boulder), and others. Rather, the 'treacherous minefields" are the old "political correctness" horror stories of 15 years ago, repackaged for 2005. In their egregious mistreatment of Noam Chomky, the show played short, fragmentary, and in their own right incomprehensible clips taken from an interview its producers conduced with Chomsky in his office at MIT, interspersed with the most outlandish, loud-mouthed rebuttals from the show's hosts (Penn) instructing the audience that Chomsky is an idiot and doesn't know what he's talking about. Most telling of all, the show played long clips of interviews with Horowitz (who has even co-edited a book titled The Anti-Chomsky Reader, and whose FrontPage website includes a link to the blog "Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite," the avowed purpose of which is the "permanent and total discrediting of the work of Noam Chomsky and his fellow travellers") and Kors to warn of the dangers posed by the "political correctness" police---along with Penn's interjections about Chomsky's ignorance. Oh, my. According to the online schedule for the program Bullshit, the "College" show will air at least once more, on Friday evening, June 3, at 10:00 PM eastern time in the States. It's worth catching the show just to observe the great American media (Showtime being a "wholly owned subsidiary of Viacom Inc.," in case you were wondering) spinning out on yet another utterly false hysteria. Though this particular show's smears of Noam Chomsky are quite deliberate and malicious. Postscript (June 3): It's a shame that I can't find a link to the photographic image that appears on the front page (centered, mostly above the fold) of this morning's Chicago Tribune. (For a temporary file of the Chicago Tribune's June 3, 2005 Front Page.) But the photo depicts an Afghan woman named Faozia Mirakai, dressed in the camouflage uniform of the Afghan "counternarcotics" police, while she holds her automatic weapon against her right shoulder, pointing it forward in an aggressive posture.
"Trading Burqas for Camouflage," Kim Barker, Chicago Tribune, June 3, 2005 "On a Foot Patrol in Kabul," Rocinante, ZNet, July 18, 2004Quite some trade, I'm sure you'll agree: A burqa for a military uniform and automatic weapon. But what else do you suppose Ms. Mirakai's change of uniforms signifies? Repression for Freedom? Domination for Feminity? The East for the West? Islam for Christianity? The Dictatorship of Relativism for the Dictatorship of Right? I am open to suggestions. Postscript (June 4): Though I warn you ahead of time that a lot of the URLs I've incorporated in the following blogs have been changed at their source since I first composed them (a rotten bait-and-switch practice by the proprietors of these media firms to extract $$$$$ from us), nevertheless, in the spirit of "Soldiers of Christ II: Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters," Chris Hedges' article in May issue of Harper's, the rise of Christofascism (and the soggy Christopher Hitchens thinks Islamofascism is bad!), and, last but not least, the "dictatorship of relativism," check out:
"The Great American Genitals Caper," ZNet, November 3, 2004 "Holy Rollers," ZNet, November 5, 2004 "Gestapo Journalism," ZNet, April 24, 2005 "In the Penal Colony," ZNet, May 4, 2005Postscript (June 6): O Great Perturbation of men's minds from the insidious invasions of error from every side! Given the now-complete (and total-authoritarian) capture of the "hermeneutic" of the Second Vatican Council by the Ratzinger faction in Rome (i.e., the new Pope Benedict XVI stands in very much the same relation to Vatican II as the Bush Administration's nominee John R. Bolton will stand to the United Nations, come the day the Senate finally confirms him: As very this-worldly destroyers), I am uncertain which of the following two reports on things related to the place of the Church of Rome in the modern world is the more relevant. So I have no choice but to post links to both of them:
"A sign from above seen on a turtle from below," Michael Drakulich, Daily Southtown, June 6, 2005 "2 Catholic priests removed," William Lee and Courney Greve, Daily Southtown, June 6, 2005
(Quick aside. Wish that I could also post a link to the photographic image of the Mary of the Turtle's Underbelly. But the fact of the matter is, I can't find one.)May Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our faith, be with you by His power. And may the Immaculate Virgin, the destroyer of all heresies, be with you by her prayers and aid. Amen.
Pascendi Dminici Gregis: On the Doctrines of the Modernists, Pope Pius X, 1907 Gaudium Et Spes: Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, Pope Paul VI, 1965 "Dominus Iesus": On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, August 6, 2000Postscript (June 7): I have no doubt that the film, The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis' 2004 documentary for the BBC, is "a helluva lot more interesting than what Michael Moore had to say [in Fahrenheit 9/11]," as Peter Bergen writes in a recent review for The Nation (June 20). Nevertheless. Might it not be the case that American Power is even more---indeed, by light-years---of a "fierce and determined organization that has spawned a global ideological movement led by [fill in the blank], whose influence and plans we have every reason to be deeply concerned about," to rewrite here a passage that Bergen had devoted to al Qaeda instead? And get a load of this throwaway line from the very last paragraph: "The Power of Nightmares, which sometimes has the feel of a Noam Chomsky lecture channeled by Monty Python...." A lecture by Chomsky, as channeled by Monty Python? What a wonderful betrayal of the nature of the Nation-Left as it exists in the modern world! For a second there, I thought I had entirely mixed up my media, and was tuning-in to Penn & Teller's series Bullshit! on the American cable TV channel Showtime. My mistake. Silly me.
"Beware the Holy War: The Power of Nightmares," Peter Bergen, The Nation, June 20, 2005 The Power of Nightmares - The Rise of the Politics of Fear, Written and Produced by Adam Curtis, BBC-2, 2004 Part I: Baby It's Cold Outside, BBC-2, October 20, 2004 Part II: The Phantom Victory, BBC-2, October 27, 2004 Part III: The Shadows In The Cave, BBC-2, November 3, 2004 "The Making of the Terror Myth," Andy Beckett, The Guardian, October 15, 2004 "The Power of Nightmares: Baby It's Cold Outside," BBC News U.K. Edition, January 14, 2005 "The Power of Nightmares: The Phantom Victory," BBC News U.K. Edition, January 14, 2005 "The Power of Nightmares: The Shadows In The Cave," BBC News U.K. Edition, January 14, 2005Postscript (June 9): A gem for everyone: The text of the late Pope John Paul II's opening remarks at the 1979 conference of the Latin American Bishops, delivered January 28, 1979. (In Rome's nomenclature: Evangelization in Latin America's Future, Third General Conference of the Latin American Bishops, Puebla de los Angeles, Mexico, January 27-February 13, 1979.) Permit me to excerpt a section of the Pope's remarks here:
I,4. Now today we find in many places a phenomenon that is not new. We find "re-readings" of the Gospel that are the product of theoretical speculations rather than of authentic meditation on the word of God and a genuine evangelical commitment. They cause confusion insofar as they depart from the central criteria of the Church's faith, and people have the temerity to pass them on as catechesis to Christian communities. In some cases people are silent about Christ's divinity, or else they indulge in types of interpretation that are at variance with the Church's faith. Christ is alleged to be only a "prophet," a proclaimer of God's Kingdom and love, but not the true Son of God. Hence he allegedly is not the center and object of the gospel message itself. In other cases people purport to depict Jesus as a political activist, as a fighter against Roman domination and the authorities, and even as someone involved in the class struggle. This conception of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth, does not tally with the Church's catechesis. Confusing the insidious pretext of Jesus' accusers with the attitude of Jesus himself -- which was very different -- people claim that the cause of his death was the result of a political conflict; they say nothing about the Lord's willing self-surrender or even his awareness of his redemptive mission. The Gospels show clearly that for Jesus anything that would alter his mission as the Servant of Yahweh was a temptation (Matt. 4:8; Luke 4:5). He does not accept the position of those who mixed the things of God with merely political attitudes (Matt. 22:21; Mark 12:17; John 18:36). He unequivocally rejects recourse to violence. he opens his message of conversion to all, and he does not exclude even the publicans. The perspective of his mission goes much deeper. It has to do with complete and integral salvation through a love that brings transformation, peace, pardon, and reconciliation. And there can be no doubt that all this imposes exacting demands on the attitude of any Christians who truly wish to serve the least of their brothers and sisters, the poor, the needy, the marginalized; ie all those whose lives reflect the suffering countenance of the Lord (Second Vatican Council, LUMEN GENTIUM:8). I,5. Against such "re-readings," therefore, and against the perhaps brilliant but fragile and inconsistent hypotheses flowing from them, "evangelization in Latin America's present and future" cannot cease to affirm the Church's faith: Jesus Christ, the Word and Son of God, becomes human to draw close to human beings and to offer them, through the power of his mystery, the great gift of God that is salvation (EN 19, 27). This is the faith that has informed your history, that has shaped what is best in the values of your peoples, and that must continue to animate the dynamics of their future in the most energetic terms. This is the faith that reveals the vocation to concord and unity that must banish the danger of warfare from this continent of hope, a continent in which the Church has been such a potent force for integration. This, in short, is the faith that has found such lively and varied expression among the faithful of Latin America in their religiosity or popular piety. Rooted in this faith in Christ and in the bosom of the Church, we are capable of serving human beings and our peoples, of penetrating their culture with the Gospel, of transforming hearts, and of humanizing systems and structures. Any form of silence, disregard, mutilation, or inadequate emphasis on the whole of the mystery of Jesus Christ that diverges from the Church's faith cannot be the valid content of evangelization. "Today, under the pretext of a piety that is false, under the deceptive appearance of a preaching of the gospel message, some people are trying to deny the Lord Jesus, "wrote a great bishop in the midst of the hard crises of the fourth century. And he added: "I speak the truth, so that the cause of the confusion that we are suffering may be known to all. I cannot keep silent" (St. Hilary of Poiters, AD AUXENTUM, 1-4). Nor can you, the bishops of today, keep silent when this confusion occurs. This is what Pope Paul VI recommended in his opening address at the Medellin Conference: "Speak, speak, preach, write, take a position, as is said, united in plan and intention, for the defense and elucidation of the truths of the faith, on the relevance of the Gospel, on the questions that interest the life of the faithful and the defense of Christian conduct ...." To fulfill my duty to evangelize all of humanity, I myself will never tire of repeating: "Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of State, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization and development" (John Paul II, Inaugural homily of his pontificate, 22 October, 1978).So: Within Latin America, i.e., within the U.S. bloc, the "valid content of evangelization" excludes the "conception of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth"---various "re-readings" that "purport to depict Jesus as a political activist, as a fighter against Roman domination and the authorities, and even as someone involved in the class struggle." But within the Soviet bloc? The "delicate boundary between the religious and the political," as the New York Times once put it, delicately. "Many prelates have conjured vivid comparisons between the Pope's stance in Poland - where he roused crowds with references to 'solidarity', lectured Communist Party chief Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski on human rights and huddled with Solidarity leader Lech Walesa - and his posture a few months earlier in Latin America, where he warned against the temptations of Marxism, chastised priests who hold positions in the Nicaraguan Government, and attacked the leftist 'People's Church', which links Christianity and revolution, as 'absurd' and dangerous." ("Rights and Wrongs of Political Activism," Kenneth A. Briggs, New York Times, September 11, 1983.) No dilemmas stemming from relativism here. Since the Fourth Century at the latest, the very this-worldly Church of Rome always has known which side it was on.
Opening Address at the Puebla Conference, Pope John Paul II, Puebla de los Angeles, Mexico, January 28, 1979 Papal Documents (Homepage), The Holy See, Rome Papal Encyclicals Online (Master List) Documents of the Roman Catholic Church (Homepage) The Catholic Library Online (Homepage) The Catholic Encyclopedia Online (Homepage)Postscript (June 11): Am depositing here a bunch of links for future use. Hopefully, I'll have the chance to do something constructive with them in the days and weeks ahead.
Steven L. Burg and Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe), 1999 David Chandler, “Western Intervention and the Disintegration of Yugoslavia, 1989-1999,” in Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000), pp. 19-30 Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1999) Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia's Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition, 2nd. Ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995) Robert M. Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1999) Diana Johnstone, Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002) Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes Against Humanity (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004) David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995) Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1995) - East European Constitutional Review - East European Politics and Societies - Slavic Review "The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention," Maria Todorova, Slavic Review, 1994 "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia," Milica Bakic-Hayden, Slavic Review, 1995Srebrenica: A Cry from the Grave (Several web-based resources) The Fall of Srebrenica (A/54/549), Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to General Assembly resolution 53/35, November 15, 1999 (For the PDF version of the same document) For records of some pivotal UN Security Council activity in the aftermath of the fall-evacuations of Srebrenica and Zepa, and during the major expulsion from the Krajina, see:
The Situation in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (S/PV.3553), UN Security Council, July 12, 1995, 1.05 p.m., esp. pp. 10-11 Statement by the President of the Security Council (S/PRST/1995/32), July 14, 1995 The Situation in Croatia (S/PV.3563), UN Security Council, August 10, 1995, 3 p.m. UN Security Council Resolution 1009 (S/RES/1009), August 10, 1995 The Situation in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (S/PV.3564), UN Security Council, August 10, 1995, 5.30 p.m., esp. pp. 6-7 UN Security Council Resolution 1010 (S/RES/1010), August 10, 1995And for the entirety of the Security Council's Meetings and Actions in 1995. Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware," LTC John E. Sray, U.S. Army, Foreign Military Studies, October, 1995 "Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press," Peter Brock, Foreign Policy, No. 93, Winter 1993-94 p. 152-172 Notice that Cees Wiebes makes some good use of Sray's analysis---along with any number of "confidential" interviews with various members of the "intelligence" services of different states involved in the wars over the former Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s. For Wiebes' treatment, see "The perception and the information position of the Western intelligence services," in Ch. 2, "The Western intelligence community and the war in Bosnia," Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992-1995 (London: Lit Verlag, 2003), esp. pp. 63-85. On the interesting question of what role mujahedin may have played in the wars over Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular---with obvious implications not only for Kosovo, but also current American obsessions, Wiebes book also is helpful: Ch. 4 "Secret arms supplies and other covert actions," Sect. 5 "The deployment of mercenaries, advisers and volunteers" (pp. 207-208 in the printed version). Richard Norton-Taylor, “US used Islamists to arm Bosnians: Official Dutch report says that Pentagon broke UN embargo,” The Guardian, April 22, 2002 Richard J Aldrich, “America used Islamists to arm the Bosnian Muslims: The Srebrenica report reveals the Pentagon's role in a dirty war,” The Guardian, April 22, 2002 The 9/11 Commission Report, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton et al., National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004 [Both of my cites derive from the PDF]
“In 1992, KSM spent some time fighting alongside the mujahideen in Bosnia and and supporting that effort with financial donations.” (p. 147) And footnote 9, Ch. 5: “KSM's presence in Bosnia coincided with a police station bombing in Zagreb where the timing device of the bomb (a modified Casio watch) resembled those manufactured by KSM and Yousef in the Philippines for the Manila Air operation. (p. 489)Clinton-Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia into Militant Islamic Base, Senator Larry E. Craig, Chairman, Republican Policy Committee, United States Senate, January 16, 1997 "The UN and Kosovo's Challenge of 'Humanitarian Intervention'," Ramesh Thakur, United Nations University, [2000?] Francisco Gil-White (Homepage), Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania Writings on the Former Yugoslavia, Francisco Gil-White "Bosnia's bombers," David Binder, The Nation, October 2, 1995 "Refuting the Srebrenica Myth: An Islamist Perspective," Konstantin Kilibarda, Emperor's Clothes, [date?] "Important Internal Documents from Germany's Foreign Office Regarding Pre-Bombardment Genocide in Kosovo," trans. Eric Canepa, Brecht Forum, New York, April 28, 1999 The following important passage occurs in Noam Chomsky's The New Military Humanism (p. 36, citing an item that was broadcast by the BBC television program Panorama, April 19, 1999):
A month after the bombing began, General Clark reported that the plans for Operation Horseshoe "have never been shared with me," and---even more incriminating---that the NATO operation planned by "the political leadership"Thank you, then-NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark.was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing. It was not designed as a emans of waging war against the Serbs and MUP forces in Kosovo. Not in any way. There was never any intent to do that. That was not the idea.
Question: In The Hague last week the NATO governments have argued that the International Court of Justice does not have jurisdiction. I want to know if NATO is afraid of being judged by the International Court of Justice, and also what will happen if NATO is brought before the International Criminal Tribunal, will they also argue that there is no jurisdiction? Is NATO not prepared to recognise the authority of the International Court of Justice? Jamie Shea: As you know, without NATO countries there would be no International Court of Justice, nor would there be any International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia because NATO countries are in the forefront of those who have established these two tribunals, who fund these tribunals and who support on a daily basis their activities. We are the upholders, not the violators, of international law. Question: Shouldn't you recognise the jurisdiction then? Jamie Shea: We obviously recognise the jurisdiction of these tribunals, but I can assure you, when these tribunals look at Yugoslavia I think they will find themselves fully occupied with the far more obvious breaches of international law that have been committed by Belgrade than any hypothetical breaches that may have occurred by the NATO countries, and I expect that to apply to both. So that is our position on that, we recognise international law, in fact we recognise international law so much that when we see a massive violation of it, with thousands of people driven from their homes, thousands of people killed, thousands of young men unaccounted for, others being herded around like cattle within their own country, we don't just shout about it, we do something to stop it because we uphold international law. Question: Well why don't you recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice? Jamie Shea: I said we do recognise the jurisdiction. Question: No, because you were only arguing that it … every NATO country was arguing that there was no jurisdiction and you did not deal with the substantive issue. If you believe that international law is so important, why would you not allow the court to judge on these substantive issues. Jamie Shea: The charge by Yugoslavia was brought under the genocide convention. That does not apply to NATO countries. As to whom it does apply, I think we know the answer there. ………… "Press Conference given by NATO Spokesman, Jamie Shea and SHAPE Spokesman, Major General Walter Jertz," North Atlantic Treaty Organization, May 17, 1999“Rolling Thunder: The Rerun,” George Kenney, The Nation, June 14, 1999 "Misleading UN Report on Kosovo (Part A)," Jan Oberg, TFF PressInfo 77, Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Lund, Sweden, October 3, 1999 "Misleading UN Report on Kosovo (B)," Jan Oberg, TFF PressInfo 78, Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Lund, Sweden, October 3, 1999 "Kosovo one year later: From Serb Repression to NATO-Sponsored Ethnic Cleansing," Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, ZNet, June 23, 2000 "Open Letter to the Editors at The Nation," Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, November 7, 2001 Balkan Witness, Rocinante, ZNet, May 24, 2004 Counting Bodies at the World Trade Center, Rocinante, ZNet, June 14, 2004 Postscript (June 17): In the "Global War on Terror," how do you suppose so-called "unlawful enemy combatants" become unlawful enemy combatants? Is there an action they first must perform, or a mental state they must possess, before they can be thusly designated? Like invading or otherwise operating within U.S. national territory, attacking U.S. citizens or residents and their property, and engaging in violent actions that could be fairly described as terrorism, as insurgency, even as acts of war? (The agents who perpetrated the spectacular events of September 11, 2001 having been the sine qua non of this category of combatant, let us not forget. Though it is also worth remembering that not a single one of them ever was designated as such. Much less detained on account of it.) Or is membership within the unlawful enemy combatant category something that others impose upon them? In other words, a case in which the U.S. military attacks, invades, or otherwise occupies a foreign territory, and, in doing so, forcibly detains individuals against their will, their detention by U.S. forces being sufficient to render the detainees unlawful enemy combatants---not prisoners of war, mind you, or unlawfully detained individuals, but members of this new category of detainee the Executive Banch insists it possess the right as well as the power to detain? And would your answer to this line of inqury be modified, were you to be instructed that "America is at war. This war is not a metaphorical war; it is as tangible as the blood, the dust, and the rubble that littered the streets of Manhattan on September 11th, 2001" (here quoting the prepared testimony of Air Force Brigadier General Thomas L. Hemingway before the Senate Judiciary Committee (June 15, 2005))? The senior Democratic Senator from the State of Illinois, Richard Durbin, recently spoke out against the American practice---ordered from the highest level of the Executive Branch down---of illegally detaining individuals under the "unlawful enemy combatant" category, rather than recognizing them to be "prisoners of war," and using various forms of physical and especially psychological torture methods against them. As the Washington Times reported the event, "In a speech on the Senate floor late Tuesday [June 14], Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin... castigated the American military's actions by reading an e-mail from an FBI agent. The agent complained to higher-ups that one al Qaeda suspect was chained to the floor, kept in an extremely cold air-conditioned cell and forced to hear loud rap music..." ("Gitmo called death camp," Rowan Scarborough, June 16). Although I haven't been able to determine which of the many internal FBI emails descrying conditions at Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray Durbin read, the Washington Times's added:
After reading the e-mail, Mr. Durbin said, "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners." Mr. Durbin also likened the treatment of terror suspects at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to authorize the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. "It took us almost 40 years for us to acknowledge that we were wrong, to admit that these people should never have been imprisoned. It was a shameful period in American history," Mr. Durbin said. "I believe the torture techniques that have been used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other places fall into that same category."Then, asked by the Washington Times to respond to several criticisms of his June 14 remarks, Durbin replied in a statement sent to the Times:
"No one, including the White House, can deny the statement I read on the Senate floor was made by an FBI agent describing the torture of a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay," he said. "That torture was reprehensible and totally inconsistent with the values we hold dear in America. "This administration should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions and authorizing torture techniques that put our troops at risk and make Americans less secure."
Senator Richard Durbin, U.S. Senate Floor, Congressional Record, June 14, 2005, pp. 6592-6595 S6593 S6594 S6595 "Detainees," Hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, June 15, 2005 Congressional Record, 109th Congress (2005-2006) (THOMAS Search Engine)
The "delicate boundary
By Loss, Weight at Apr 05, 2007 21:47 PM
The "delicate boundary between the religious and the political," as the New York Times once put it, delicately. "Many prelates have conjured vivid comparisons between the Pope's stance in Poland - where he roused crowds with references to 'solidarity', lectured Communist Party chief Gen.
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