Tag: war

Saints of North America

Today, many American Orthodox Churches will commemorate the Saints of North America. It’s an annual joy to sing:

Rejoice, O mountains of Pennsylvania;
leap for joy, O waters of the Great Lakes;
rise up, O fertile plains of Canada;
for the elect of Christ who dwelt in you are glorified,
men and women who left their homes for a new land!
With faith, hope, and patience as their armor,
they courageously fought the good fight.
Comforted by the beauty of the Orthodox Faith,
they labored in mines and mills, they tilled the land,
they braved the challenges of the great cities,
enduring many hardships and sufferings.
Never failing to worship God in spirit and truth
and unyielding in devotion to His most pure Mother,
they erected many temples to His glory.
Come, O assembly of the Orthodox,
and with love let us praise the holy men, women, and children,
those known to us and those known only to God,
and let us cry out to them:
“Rejoice, all Saints of North America and pray to God for us.

Although she’s too newly-glorified to have made it into the services, Righteous Olga of Kwethluk is now in their number.

And I awoke to the news that we’re (unofficially?) at war with Iran, about which I can only feel ambivalent, knowing the arguments pro and con and with a personal history of formal conscientious objection during the Vietnam era. Pray in accordance with your deepest convictions about this conflict, but do pray, and add “Thy will be done.”

No creed but the Bible

By the 1840s one analyst of American Protestantism concluded, after surveying fifty-three American sects, that the principle “No creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion. John W. Nevin surmised that this emphasis grew out of a popular demand for “private judgment” and was “tacitly if not openly conditioned always by the assumption that every man is authorized and bound to get at this authority in a direct way for himself, through the medium simply of his own single mind.” Many felt the exhilarating hope that democracy had opened an immediate access to biblical truth for all persons of good will.

Americans found it difficult to realize, however, that a commitment to private judgment could drive people apart, even as it raised beyond measure their hopes for unity.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity.

Enamored with power

“I’ve lived in SE Michigan my entire life, and have always been a Republican—part of the Evangelical-Republican alliance, back when it was, I believe, honorable. But Evangelicals as a whole lost their way many years ago when the alliance became a religious cause in itself, a cause larger than our former convictions,” Brown told me earlier this year. “We became so enamored with power, it should have been no surprise to me (though it was) that evangelicals were and are willing to sacrifice our moral reputations for the sake of ‘winning.’ … I’ve hated every moment of Trump’s presidency, because of what I fear it’s done to the Gospel, and the reputations of those who claim to believe it.”

Tim Alberta, 20 Americans Who Explain the 2020 Election – POLITICO

Ken Brown is not wrong, I think, about what Trump has done to the reputations of “Christians” writ broadly.

But on the chance that someone reading this thinks that Christians suck because they support Trump (or for any other reason), be it remembered that Evangelicals (whatever and whoever they are) are merely a prominent public face of Christianity in the USA. They are not the only Christians. They are not uniquely “real Christians.” They are not consistent adherents of historic Christianity. And historic, Orthodox Christianity is deeply, deeply different than its thrice-removed cousins.

(And not all Christians support Trump, though it would seem more than a bit fishy to me if one could consistently predict another’s political preferences merely be the church they attend.)

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Culture

Made Men

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A perennial favorite for the internet age

I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me. But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself—a zone of relevance—by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular.

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

Another oldie

To say that we and the Soviet Union are to be compared is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes the old lady into the way of an oncoming bus, and the man who pushes the old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus, are both people who push old ladies around.

William F. Buckley via Douglas Murray

New Illustration for the Urban Dictionary

Cringe: It’s like this.

(H/T Nellie Bowles)

Owning the full weight of your worldview

One doesn’t see this sort of observation much any more:

Reason is an absolute … Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.

C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory

Good Dad

Dad only had three stages in his day. He was either (1) drinking coffee, (2) had just finished drinking coffee, or (3) was brewing a fresh pot right now.

Ted Gioia, How Coffee Became a Joke. Unlike Ted, I rather like Starbucks, but the only frou-frou I ever ordered was one, and only ever one, Pumpkin Spice Latté, just to see what the buzz was about. Otherwise, I’m happy with whatever dark roast is on offer or even Pike Place if necessary.

Ruso-Ukraine war and NATO

Be it remembered:

Many sober voices warned that an expansion of NATO to Russia’s border would poke the Bear, leading to an inevitable war. As long ago as 1998, following the U.S. decision to expand NATO eastwards, George Kennan said the following to Thomas Friedman:

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

“We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a lighthearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.

Patrick J. Deneen, Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism

And recently, we’ve had people in the know bragging that we are going to bring Ukraine itself into NATO, though “we have neither the resources nor the intention” of following through by vigorously defending, with troops, a new member that was already under attack when admitted to NATO.

Campus Protests

Coddled2

[S]ociety takes the attitudes and antics of the young far too seriously. In an era when we are reliably informed that adolescence persists well into the twenties, it is strange that we deem the views of anyone under the age of thirty to have any real significance or merit. Yet it seems to be an unspoken assumption that young people, especially young, angry, and opinionated people, are to be indulged as important … 

This exaltation of youth is simultaneously the exaltation of ignorance and incompetence. Early claims of Israeli occupation of Gaza and the continued sloppy use of the language of genocide, fueled by people at the U.N. who could benefit from using a dictionary, are two obvious examples of the former. As for the latter, when, for example, did adult revolutionaries hold hunger strikes lasting a whole twelve hours or seize buildings and then demand that the university authorities give them food and water? I have no affection for Che Guevara, but he did at least spend time in a Bolivian jungle while trying to foment revolution. I presume he never once considered whining to the Bolivian government about the harsh conditions of jungle life and had to find his own food and water. A cynic might say that even our revolutionaries are pathetic these days.

Carl R. Trueman, ‌What the Pro-Palestinian Campus Protests Are Really About

One of the voices on the Matter of Opinion podcast Friday likened Columbia University getting police to clear our an occupied hall to “calling the police on your own kids” because the University is in loco parentis. I think the voice belonged to someone named “Van Winkle.”

I was in college when students effectually abolished in loco parentis. They didn’t want anyone telling them what to do and what not to do. But, giving credit to Ms. Van Winkle, they did generally whistle a different tune when there was the threat of police being brought in.

I’ve long thought take your pick; you don’t deserve protective in loco parentis (“we’ll take care of this ourselves, officer”) if you’re not willing to live by university rules (“here’s the rules you’re expected to live by”).

Radical Revolutionaries on the cheap

And of course the protesters all want (and I’m sure will get) the arrests taken off their records. They want to be radical revolutionaries holding a radical protest. They also want the protest catered ASAP. And when it’s done for summer, they want good grades in all the classes and squeaky-clean records. McKinsey doesn’t staff itself!

Nellie Bowles.

Another thing I seem to remember is that civil disobedience includes taking the consequences for breaking an unjust law. Scott free for breaking a just law does not compute.

Forewarding illiberalism

As readers know, I’m deeply sympathetic to the argument that Israel has over-reached, over-bombed, and over-reacted in its near-unhinged overkill of Palestinian civilians, especially children, in the wake of 10/7’s horrors. It has been truly horrifying. I begrudge no one demonstrating passionately to protest this. But as I watch the rhetoric and tactics of many — but not all — of these students, I’m struck by how this humane concern is less prominent than the rank illiberalism and ideological extremism among many.

Preventing students from attending classes, taking exams, or even walking around their own campus freely is not a protest; it’s a crime. So is the destruction of property, and the use of physical intimidation and violence against dissenting students. The use of masks to conceal identity is reminiscent of the Klan, and antithetical to non-violent civil disobedience. It’s a way for outsiders to easily infiltrate and a way to escape responsibility for thuggishness. It’s menacing, ugly and cowardly.

It did not have to be this way. Imagine if students simply demonstrated peacefully for a cease-fire, placed the victims and hostages at the forefront of the narrative, and allowed themselves to be arrested proudly on camera and face legal consequences for their actions, as the civil rights movement did. Imagine if they were emphatically non-violent and always open to debate.

But they aren’t, because they are not the inheritors of the Christian, universalist civil rights movement but its illiberal, blood-and-soil nemesis, long curated in the Ivy League.

…

And they will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972.

Andrew Sullivan

Politics

Life in the Stupid Party

(I don’t remember the source, but someone called our two major parties the Evil Party and the Stupid Party.)

The so-called hard right in the House is learning an old lesson: Life is hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.

Kevin D. Williamson

On Democrats’ promise to help defeat Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to oust Speaker Mike Johnson:

Republicans, rather than fume that Democrats have denied them a chance to self-destruct, should consider that perhaps this is the inevitable result of the mid-session motion-to-vacate game that has brought them to the brink of losing their majority without an intervening election. A conference that can’t bear to see any of its members lead the House will soon enough encounter a cure for that.

National Review, The Week email for 5/3/24.

Meanwhile, over at the Evil Party

Once someone determined Trump was so bad it was okay to lie about him, it set the precedent that the only thing that mattered was a subject’s politics.

Matt Taibbi via James Howard Kunstler

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Manufacturing Enemies

It is necessary sometimes to ask questions just so they’re not forgotten in the miasma war-mongers, who know that war is the health of the state, consciously create. Pat Buchanan obliges:

[I]s it not time to put al-Qaeda in perspective and consider whether our Mideast policy is creating more terrorists than we are killing?

…

But by having fought a “war on terror” overseas in [Lindsey] Graham’s way — invading, occupying, nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq — we lost 6,000 soldiers and brought back 40,000 wounded Americans.

Were the wars in which we suffered such casualties, and that cost us $2 trillion and counting, really worth it? Did they make us more secure?

…

Ten years ago, anti-interventionists warned that a plunge into the Islamic world would produce what it was designed to prevent. We could create more terrorists than we would kill.

For the root of 9/11 was Islamic hatred of America’s perceived domination and a fanatic determination to drive us out of their world.

They were over here because we were over there. And if we went over there in even greater force, even more Muslims would rise up to expel us from what is, after all, their neighborhood, not ours.

So the anti-interventionists argued.

…

After 58,000 dead we left Vietnam. How many Americans have the Vietnamese killed since we left?

William Pfaff agrees, but in different terms:

The war against terror now being conducted from the White House, with the increasing use of drones, obviously is a self-perpetuating and self-enlarging undertaking that of its nature guarantees that the United States is the creator and perpetuator of the very war it fights.

…

What has happened to this administration? We know that the Republican Party is now institutionally deranged. The government bureaucracy has since 9/11 been purged of dissent, militarized, securitized, all of its members now under orders to spy on all of their fellows to report any suspicious move anyone might make. Washington is thereby rendered increasingly immobile when confronted with a need for thoughtful action. The world regards the American government today with amazement and no little fear.

…

The George W. Bush administration, the neo-conservatives, the Zionist movement and now the Barack Obama administration, have out of colossal ignorance and lack of prudence gone to war against this fundamentalist movement. It is this upheaval that Mr. Obama thinks he is going to conquer, with his drones and his talismatic technological modernism of mass information—and supposed mass omniscience.

These tools now tell American governments about everything except the essential facts. These facts are that Islamic fundamentalism will fail because theocracy cannot survive in the post-Ottoman world. This already is being demonstrated in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey. Despite that, Islamic society will in the end settle its own history—which may prove only another tragedy. The other fact is that an arrogant and foolish United States, as exists today, can only harm itself by interfering, and become part of the tragedy.

Were I to travel abroad today, I’d have to say repeatedly “I love my country but detest its government.” Because I write blogs like this, I could add “and oppose it openly.” And I can tell my grandchildren that I did not sit idly by as the Great Hubris played out.

History, insofar as it cares at all, will presumably find plenty to fault in my positions (I am reflexively opposed to violence).

But I very much doubt that history will say “Islamic fascism arose spontaneously and the United States of America fought valiantly against it.” The judgment, I fear, will be more like “Islamic extremism arose in response to the insouciant American crypto-Empire, and America fanned the flames, to keep the voters scared and compliant, until the Great Collapse of the American Hegemon, which the world greeted with a sigh of relief.”

In other words, I think we’re living in an unfolding tragedy, wherein America’s tragic flaw – the felt necessity of being about something, of needing a grand-if-not-grandiose mission, of being a “nation with the soul of a [fundamentalist] Church” – plays out in folly, perversity, and collapse.

And then … it will be some other empire’s turn, until Messiah comes (again).

* * * * *

“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.