Two must-reads

The Death Of Europe, With Douglas Murray, from The Hoover Institution

The Codevilla Tapes, on Tablet

The historian of American statecraft and spycraft and conservative political philosopher Angelo Codevilla talks about the ruling elite, Jonathan Pollard, and the rise of the techno-surveillance state—and the consequent demise of the American Empire

No excerpting here - just read both of them, beginning to end.

Mexico and USA - failed states to be?

Mexico is teetering into failed-state status:

A Drug Cartel Just Defeated The Mexican Military In Battle

The idea that a nation of 120 million people with whom the United States shares a 2,000-mile border and ever-increasing economic ties might spiral into collapse has not seriously occurred to the American people. We’ve had a century of relative peace on our southwest border, and aside from dealing with an occasional surge of illegal immigration, we have assumed that it will continue. It will not.

Culiacan should be a wake-up call that the war now underway in Mexico will not stay there, and that we’d better start thinking about what that will mean for America.

 Wall 2.0: Might Have to Put Machine Guns On the Wall (Just in Case)

You may have read the news just a few days back: the Mexican military captured not one but two of El Chapo’s sons in the heart of Culiacán, the Sinaloan capital. One son freed himself—which is to say his entourage and retainers at hand overpowered and killed the soldiers at hand—and then, in a decisive riposte, seized the entire city center of Culiacán to compel the liberation of his brother.

 The forces that emerged were in the literal sense awesome and awful. Heavy weaponry that would be familiar on any Iraqi, Syrian, or Yemeni battlefield was brought to bear. More and worse: custom-built armored vehicles, designed and built to make a Sahel-warfare technical look like an amateur’s weekend kit job, were rolled out for their combat debut. Most critically, all this hardware was manned by men with qualities the Mexican Army largely lacks: training, tactical proficiency, and motivation.

Then the coup de grace: as the Chapo sons’ forces engaged in direct combat with their own national military, kill squads went into action across Culiacán, slaughtering the families of soldiers engaged in the streets.

Same post: "You might think nothing could be worse than ISIS. You’d be thinking wrong."

After about three months of training it was time for the “final exam,” which involved “cutting people up a special way,” Capache explains. Recruits took turns administering a specific, byzantine series of stabs and slashes to a live victim—usually a thief or petty criminal the cartel deemed deserving of such punishment. The first series of ordered knife cuts was meant to torture for information without killing. Then to strike fatal blows. And at last to cut up the body by hand for disposal. — In Mexico’s Drug Cartel Country, a Murderer Who Kills Murderers Tells His Story  Trust me, you don’t want to RTWT  ]

A state entering the preliminary stages of "failed": Yes, antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis.

Last weekend [in August] in Berkeley, Calif., a group of neo-communist antifa — “anti-fascist” — thugs attacked peaceful protesters at a “No to Marxism in America” rally, wielding sticks and pepper spray, and beating people with homemade shields that read (I kid you not) “No Hate.” The Post reports how one peaceful protester “was attacked by five black-clad antifa members, each windmilling kicks and punches into a man desperately trying to protect himself.” Members of the Berkeley College Republicans were then stalked by antifa goons who followed them to a gas station and demanded they “get the [expletive] out” of their car, warning, “We are real hungry for supremacists and there is more of us.”

The organizer of the anti-Marxism protest is not a white supremacist. Amber Cummings is a self-described “transsexual female who embraces diversity” and had announced on Facebook that “any racist groups like the KKK [and] Neo Nazis . . . are not welcome.” The protest was needed, Cummings said, because “Berkeley is a ground zero for the Marxist Movement.”

As if to prove Cummings’s point, the antifa movement responded with jackboots and clubs — because their definition of “fascist” includes not just neo-Nazis but also anyone who opposes their totalitarian worldview.

And let’s be clear: Totalitarian is precisely what they are. Mark Bray, a Dartmouth lecturer who has defended antifa’s violent tactics, recently explained in The Post, “Its adherents are predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists” who believe that physical violence “is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.” In other words, they are no different from neo-Nazis. 

Well, the Nazis were socialists, but saying that provable historical fact makes progressives' heads explode.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invented the word fascist as the name of his post-World War 1 party, which he symbolized with the ancient Roman symbol, fasces, a bundle of reeds tied together with an axe, used by the Roman magisterium to symbolize the power of Roman law over life and death.

The Roman fasces, symbol of the Italian fascisti party of the early 20th century. 

In 1932, Mussolini defined Fascism for the Italian Encyclopedia. It included this nugget:

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, th`e Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone....

Sound familiar? It's almost a transcript of the Democrat debates so far.

Mussolini's street enforcement arm were called the Blackshirts, who were,

...originally the paramilitary wing of the National Fascist Party and, after 1923, an all-volunteer militia of the Kingdom of Italy under Fascist rule, similar to SS in Nazi-Germany. Its members were distinguished by their black uniforms (modeled on those of the Arditi, Italy's elite troops of World War I) and their loyalty to Benito Mussolini, the Duce (leader) of Fascism, to whom they swore an oath. 

Hitler copied the concept with the National Socialist Sturmabteilung, SA, who unofficially were called Brownshirts. In the early stages of the Nazi movement the Brownshirts were simply paid street thugs. Later Hitler put them under military-like discipline and they carried out planned, focused violence against Jews, communists, trade unionists and others.

So who is Antifa? They are the street thugs of the American Left, committing violence against Americans of other political persuasion. As for the Democrat party, if I had a dollar for every time a prominent Democrat or presidential candidate denounced Antifa and its violence, I would be, um, broke.

But Antifa is well funded and its leaders, at least, are paid, according to the LA Times, which also points out that paid protesters are not exactly a new thing in American politics. Most of Antifa consists of "useful idiots," but the ranks of trained and very capable Antifa blackshirts (for black is their preferred color of dress) are growing.

This is simply the socialist-left template. Military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz said that war is a continuation of politics by other means. For socialists, violence is a continuation of politics - but not by "other means," for the Left defines politics in  warring terms: "class struggle," "rising up," "workers' revolution," and such. Politics and violence therefore are not separate activities. Politics is simply a continuum that encompasses both non-violence and violence.

This is why I have maintained for three years that there is a new American civil war coming, no matter who is declared the winner of 2020's election. If Trump wins, organized, pre-planned Antifa violence will erupt the same day. If Warren or another Democrat wins, violence will follow later, as the fascisti victor turns toward emplacing socialist rule over Americans.

Mexico is already a nation at war with itself. It is on the precipice of failed state status. And as Mexico is now, the United States will be in only 13-14 months. I pray we will not come to a sauve qui peut state of affairs.

Update: These, too.

The Rethink We Need to Avoid America’s Collapse, by Robin Burk.

Our Revolution’s Logic, by Angelo Codevilla

In 2010, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of "the ruling class" back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a "cold civil war." Now he applies the "logic of revolution" to our current political scene.

State and other persecution of religious people

In last Sunday's lectionary passage from the book of Acts, the apostles are arrested for preaching that Christ is risen. They are questioned before the Jewish priestly Sanhedrin. The high priest reminds them that they had been ordered to stop such preaching.

Peter, speaking for all the apostles, responds, "We must obey God rather than any human authority." Acts records that had not a Sanhedrin member named Gamaliel argued otherwise, the apostles would have been executed that day.

Fast forward to today, and understand that there are still human authorities who will not countenance any resistance to their authority. China, for example, this month:


This was the destruction of one of the largest church buildings in the country. The Guardian reports,

Witnesses and overseas activists said the paramilitary People's Armed Police used dynamite and excavators to destroy the Golden Lampstand Church, which has a congregation of more than 50,000, in the city of Linfen in Shanxi province.

ChinaAid, a US-based Christian advocacy group, said local authorities planted explosives in an underground worship hall to demolish the building following, constructed with nearly $2.6m (£1.9m) in contributions from local worshippers in one of China's poorest regions.

The church had faced "repeated persecution" by the Chinese government, said ChinaAid. Hundreds of police and hired thugs smashed the building and seized Bibles in an earlier crackdown in 2009 that ended with the arrest of church leaders.

Those church leaders were given prison sentences of up to seven years for charges of illegally occupying farmland and disturbing traffic order, according to state media. 

And it is not just Christians. Muslims who have lived in China for centuries have suffered even worse: "Before-and-after photos show how China is destroying historical sites to monitor and intimidate its Muslim minority."

China is waging an unprecedented crackdown on a Muslim minority called the Uighurs, who live in the country's western frontier region, Xinjiang.

Muslims have for centuries settled in the region, sometimes referred to as East Turkestan. 

As part of its crackdown, which has seen the installation of facial-recognition cameras and seemingly arbitrary detentions, China's government has also destroyed traditional Uighur architecture including mosques and large parts of an ancient city called Kashgar.

Before-and-after images show the extent of some of the destruction of these historical locations.

When the state is the religion, it will always crush or suborn all others. Could never happen here, though, right? Oh, the ground is being tilled already. I give you Harvard University, April 25, 2019, and the keynote speaker of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences "Diversity Conference."

We are pleased to announce that our keynote speaker will be Tim Wise, prominent anti-racism writer, educator, and activist. A moderated discussion with Tim will be led by Renee Graham, an associate editor and columnist at the Boston Globe.

This is the same Tim Wise who posted on his Facebook page in 2015:

This is America…people basing their beliefs on the fable of Noah and Ark, or their interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah…rather than science or logic…If you are basing your morality on a fairy tale written thousands of years ago, you deserve to be locked up…detained for your utter inability to deal with reality…NO, we are not obligated to indulge your irrationality in the name of your religious freedom…but we will provide you a very comfortable room, against which walls you may hurl yourself hourly if your choose. Knock yourself out….seriously, knock yourself out, completely, for weeks at a time…I’m sorta kidding but not by much…I don’t believe lunatics like this should be locked up, but I do think they have to be politically destroyed, utterly rendered helpless to the cause of pluralism and democracy …the world is not theirs. They have no right to impose their bullshit on others. They can either change, or shut the hell up, or practice their special brand of crazy in their homes…or go away. Their choice. And this argument applies to any fundamentalist religionist of any faith who thinks they have a right to impose their beliefs on a secular, pluralistic society. Go away.

That is not only no problem for Harvard, it is positively commendable. 

All that is bad enough. However, persecution of Jews in America (though thankfully, not by the government) is growing. Not only the violent kind, such as the anti-Trump, anti-Jew gunman, John Earnest, who killed one and shot two others in the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, California. Take for example, this cartoon published by The New York Times in its overseas pages this month:

Yes, that infamous propaganda rag of the alt-right, The  New York Times - oh, wait, you say, the NYT is not alt-right? Really? How can you tell?

No wonder that this week Serge Klarsfeld, France's most famous Nazi hunter, said, "There is no safe place on earth right now for Jews." In Washington to receive the Elie Wiesel Prize, the highest award given out by the United States Holocaust Museum, Klarsfeld told reporters,

... the cartoon was "insulting," for Trump as much as for Netanyahu who was "treated like a dog."

"It is an anti-Semitic cartoon, that is to say that Jews are guiding the world and that corresponds to a stereotype very common among the far right, which one also finds on the far left," he said.

Klarsfeld, who spent decades working to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, is worried about the future of Europe and called on centrists to mobilize ahead of the next European elections.

 "Never has a far-right or far-left regime made its people happy and prosperous, inevitably the extremes of power lead to misery and barbed wire."

In rhetoric, the far left and the far right differ only in whom they identify as class enemies. Religiously, the alt-right hates Muslims. The alt-left hates Christians. And they both hate Jews even more. So in practice, there is no distinction with a difference.

Burning churches in France

Update: "If churches keep getting vandalized in France, should American news outlets cover the story?"

As someone who worked as a news reporter (and later a editor) at two major metropolitan dailies (at the New York Post and New York Daily News) and a major news network website (ABC News), I can tell you that any suspicion of arson at a house of worship, for example, is a major story.

It must somehow no longer be the case in the new and frenetic world of the internet-driven, 24-hour news cycle. That’s because a major international story — one involving at least 10 acts of vandalism at Catholic churches in France — went largely unreported (underreported, really) for weeks. The vandalism included everything from Satanic symbols scrawled on walls to shattered statues.

That’s right, a rash of fires and other acts of desecration inside Catholic churches — during Lent, even — in a country with a recent history of terrorism somehow didn’t warrant any kind of attention from American news organizations. ...

The American press in particular has been negligent on this one. In fact, one of the first websites to write about the incidents for American audiences was Breitbart. Did coverage on the politically conservative site dated March 20 suddenly make this a right-wing story? It shouldn’t have. Vandalism, no matter who the potential culprits are, should be reported by journalists. Is there a conservative or liberal way to cover a fire? I never thought so — until now. 

But remember, we learned from The Washington Post after "Easter worshippers" were blown to bits in Sri Lanka that only "far-right" Americans are angered by the murder of Christians around the globe. Apparently - and you will think I am merely snarking, but I am quite serious - killing Christians does not irritate Leftists in the slightest.

Update: "After Notre Dame, France Breaks Its Silence on Radical Islam"

The coming mosque of Notre Dame?

Bruce Bawer on the French government's response to  the fire of Notre Dame cathedral:

One thing that jumped out at me, as I watched Notre Dame burn in real time on BBC and Sky News, was the statement of some reporter or commentator or architectural expert that the cathedral could and would be rebuilt, although perhaps the new structure would be “more modern” than the old one. Later that evening, in his speech to the nation, President Macron vowed: “We will make the Cathedral of Notre Dame even more beautiful.”

More modern? More beautiful? My alarm bells went off, and they weren’t fire alarms. ...

 So it is that when one hears talk of a the construction of new Notre Dame that will be “more modern” or “more beautiful” than the original, it’s only natural – especially given that the cathedral, like all such structures in France, belongs not to the Catholic Church but to the French state –  to picture a building that, in the eyes of national and municipal officials, their interfaith advisors, and whatever cockamamie commission of postmodernism-loving architectural experts they end up putting together, ends up being some multipurpose multicultural monstrosity centered on a non-denominational worship area and/or containing different spaces for different faiths, with plenty of prayer rugs, wudu units, etc., for Muslims.

After all, in today’s Paris, Muslims already make up the majority of people who go to a house of worship at least once a week, n’est-ce pas? And given the way that these things work in most of Western Europe nowadays, it seems a foregone conclusion – barring some powerful, persuasive, and unprecedented movement to the contrary – that the voices that prevail as this project goes forward will be those arguing that the new Notre Dame must be a Notre Dame (although of course something needs to be done about that name) for the twenty-first century, for an increasingly non-Christian Paris, for an era of fundamental transformation in regard to matters spiritual. Why, after all, resurrect a cathedral that was already mainly a museum, a tourist mecca, a reminder of dead glories, when you can replace it with a spectacular mosque that will be a living place of worship for armies of believers, and will thereby serve as a dynamic, forward-looking symbol of the Paris, the France, the Europe of the twenty-first century and beyond, and hence affirm Paris’s place as the heart of a dramatically transformed Europe and – Allah willing – usher in a new Belle Époque?

Read the whole thing. I have maintained for double-digit years (though not on this blog) that Notre Dame cathedral will become a mosque during my lifetime. France's Muslim population is growing far more rapidly than ethnic French. In 2016, 8.8 percent of France's population were Muslim; in 2050 the figure will approach 20 percent.

Update: The question, "Why build it back the way it was?" is already being asked: How Should France Rebuild Notre Dame?

Much of the structure survived the blaze — but as rebuilding efforts move forward, the country will be left with a big question: What does the cathedral mean to 21st-century France?

And you better believe that a lot of answers are about to be offered.

Update: As the cathedral burned, there was jubilation from the strange alliance of Islamists and Leftists, because of what French philosopher " Bernard-Henri Lévy calls Islamo-Leftism, an 'anti-American religion' opposed to the existence of Western Civilization itself."

Meanwhile, Arab posts on an Israeli friend's Facebook page cheered Notre Dame's destruction: “This church was the HQ for the Templar Knights and was their operations room for carrying out attacks on Muslims wherever they were. We kneel (in prayer) thanking Allah and (hope) the same thing happens to the Vatican only this time the Pope is inside it.”

“God rain fire on it”.

“We’re all in solidarity with the fire. We are all the fire”.

Likewise, Social Justice Warriors posted taunts on Twitter:

“Notre-Dame burning is cosmic karma for all the historical sites and artifacts France destroyed and stole when being colonialist scum.”

"The most aesthetically pleasing visually (sic) I’ve ever seen.”

Which reminds me of destructors. "These persons simply must have an enemy, someone or some group who opposes them. For the 'my way' that destructors must get is inextricably linked to triumph over an opponent. That's why anyone who does not agree or assent to their demands is a target: the issue is not the demands, but the opposition."

Why Islam is winning in the West

Briton Jacob Williams explains why he wanted to become a Christian while a student at Oxford but rejected it and converted to Islam instead.

I had plenty of opportunities to engage with orthodox Christians, and I sincerely wanted Christianity to be true. It was clear to me that what the authorities in my world celebrated—the collapse of family life, the slaughter of the unborn, the deterioration of high culture—were, in truth, social evils that followed from the decline of the Church. Christianity seemed the natural alternative to secularity.

But when I entered the chapels and listened to the ministers, the regeneration I sought didn’t happen. Christian voices sounded all too agreeable and compromising. I wanted something stronger, something that didn’t ­bargain with secularism. I found it in Islam.

Read the whole thing. And weep.

The heartbreak in Paris

Absolutely heartbreaking destruction by fire of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris today.

My wife and I visited Notre Dame in 1985. It is one of the most magnificent structures in all the world. I have to think that the French have carefully documented it long before now - if nothing else because of the world wars.That is can be rebuilt is almost certainly not in questions. But it can never be truly reproduced. No matter how expertly they re-create the lost art, it can never be the same. Read it and weep.

Let's turn American into Sweden!

That's what freshman US Representative Alexandra Rep. Ocasio-Cortez wants to do:

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is bristling at the suggestion her proposed socialist overhaul of America would turn the country into another Venezuela.

During an interview on “60 Minutes,” the New York congressman laughed at the idea her platform of free college, a universal basic income, free health care, and a “Green New Deal” would turn the country into a failed socialist state like Cuba or Venezuela.

"Of course” that’s not what’s being planned, she said. “What we have in mind — and what of my — and my policies most closely resemble what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden."

 Well, here is Sweden:

The chart only goes to 2010. Since then America's violent-crime rate has continued to fall while Sweden's has continued to rise. Even Mother Jones knows what is happening:

And it is not just in Sweden. Across Europe, ordinary citizens are so alarmed at rising crime, especially rape, that they are arming themselves.

When hundreds of women were sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve in several German cities three years ago, Carolin Matthie decided it was time to defend herself. The 26-year-old Berlin student quickly applied for a gun permit, fearing many women would have the same idea and flood the application process.

“If I don’t do it now, I will have to wait maybe another half year,” she recalls thinking.

Gun ownership is rising across Europe, a continent that until recently faced far less gun crime and violence than much of the globe. Not long ago it was rare to see armed British police.

So there you have the socialists' goals for America.

Truth about the invasion of Europe

This is from "an interview with the German artist, activist for the rights of indigenous peoples, and UN advisor Rebecca Sommer, by the Polish website EuroIslam from January 18, 2018.

"Rebecca used to support Muslim 'refugees' in Germany, and describes how her experience made her gradually change her mind over core issues."

[A]fter looking back through the years of repetitive experiences and myself in my work environment as a volunteer, I had to admit to myself that when it comes to Muslim refugees, they have grown up with completely different values, into wich they have been brainwashed and are indoctrinated by Islam, and have no intention of adopting our values – worse, they look at us, unbelievers with superiority and arrogance. I call it “headscarf in the head”. And additionally, after their arrival here, many of them fall into the tentacles of fundamental Imams, political Islam (imported from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran etc.) who strengthen them in their fundamentalism, which prohibits them from mixing with us, infidels, and our way of life, prohibits the adoption of our perception of the world and our scientific achievements, which the German state unfortunately no longer has any control over. ...

For example, after a volunteer spent three months teaching German to a Syrian twice a week, she was convinced that everything was going well and that she was just trying to be kind and accepted the invitation for a meal together. She just thinks that he wants to thank her for help, and he thinks that the “whore” wants sexual encounter. These women do not realize that they are perceived by men from this cultural circle as infidel, immoral, and always sexually subordinate to the man, because at first the refugees seem very nice, polite and well-mannered – that is, they practice the aforementioned taqqiya. And then there was a very unpleasant surprise when a friendly – until now – immigrant dragged her by her hair into the bathroom at the moment when she wanted to say goodbye. And the reason for this is that he cannot understand that she wants to go now, because why did the “whore” come alone to his room?

Read the whole, eye-opening thing.

Dear President Trump: The West has already surrendered

In Poland Thursday, President Trump gave a speech that was truly historic. It was a speech that was near-Churchillian in focus and tone and world view. And it basically renounced successive American administrations of either party going back to at least Reagan's.

President Donald Trump waves to the crowd in
Krasiński Square, Warsaw, Thursday.

Speaking to a huge crowd in Krasiński Square, Warsaw, the president spoke of Poland's many decades of war against tyranny and oppression, but mainly he spoke thematically about what made Western civilization strong to begin with and why it must recover and reinforce its roots to prevail against Islamist imperialism, but also to suppress the waxing bureaucratic statism that grips every European country today. An excerpt:

Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger -- one firmly within our control.  This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles:  the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.  The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.

We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will.  Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have.  The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.  Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?  Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?  Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive. [Italics added]

Almost at the end, the president said,

 I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken.  Our values will prevail.  Our people will thrive.  And our civilization will triumph.  

Ah, how I want to like this speech. And at a very basic level, I do. A lot. But President Trump is sadly calling for ramparts to be manned that were abandoned decades ago and for which there are no human resources left to rebuild them. "Strong families" have disappeared from most of Europe, Mr. President, because families themselves are simply disappearing.

Put simply: Europe long ago broke itself. Its values will not prevail (they are barely hanging on now, and being weakened daily - by design and on purpose. See: Merkel, Angela).

And European civilization will not triumph. It is in full retreat now. Whether Western civilization can survive is still open to question, but if it does it will not be to Europe's credit and will almost certainly not survive there at all. Europe's future is distinctly non-European as history has known it and will be definitely non-Western.

Let's start with Poland. David Goldman posted on FB today,

There won't be a Poland in 100 years. At a total fertility rate of 1.29, Poland will have one retiree per working-age citizen by 2075. Poland in fact has one of the world's very lowest fertility rates, which means (in Mary Eberstadt's way of looking at the problem) that it is losing its religion. President Trump's speech was magnificent, but it brings to mind Schiller's dictum that history brought forth a great moment, but the moment encountered a mediocre people. Trump is doing the right thing, but we should remember that Europe is a case not for cure but for palliative care.

I have written a lot of demographic trends in the world, concentrating on Europe and the US. Nine years ago in, "What has NATO done for us?" In 2008, Russia was making military incursions into Georgia, on which Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin decided that NATO should bring Georgia into membership. I assessed not only why NATO is a strategic nullity but asked a pointed question concerning Europe's demographic death spiral:

There is another point that Mark Steyn touched on when discussing Sarah Palin's bright idea to bring Georgia into NATO. I can't find a link now, but Steyn pointed out is that Georgia's birth rate has tanked more than practically any other country in the world. In fact, by 2050 there will be only 100,000 Georgian women of childbearing age, if current trends continue. So, he said, if Georgians won't have children to grow up to defend Georgia, why should Americans have children to grow up to defend Georgia? I can't think of any good reason.

And the same question can be asked of every other European NATO member, except perhaps Britain and France. The birth rates of Germany, Spain, Italy and every other NATO country except Turkey are below the stable replacement rate of 2.1 average births per woman, most far below. Italy’s rate is 1.23 births per woman , for example, meaning that Italy’s population could shrink by one-third by mid-century. (Turkey’s birth rate is about twice as high as Italy's.)

Again the question for NATO’s countries: if you will not have enough children to preserve your country, why should American women bear children to make up your deficit?

Demographers agree that a minimum rate of 2.1 live births per woman is required to maintain a level population from one generation to the next. And what is the demographic trend across Europe?

When a culture decides not even to reproduce itself, then it had already surrendered. It had decided to go quietly into the night and fade away. That is what Europe is doing now. Despite the president's soaring rhetoric, there will be no recovery from this decision. There is far from enough time left to do so. Tens and tens of millions of women in Europe are not going to decide suddenly to start having and average of more than 2.1 children each. The Europeans economies cannot support such a change anyway. In fact, they cannot support their present, aging populations now, which is why so many Euro nations decided long ago to reply on "The Mohammed Retirement Plan" that will nail the continent's coffin shut.

Europe is not just millions of square miles of terrain. Our affiliation with Europe, and the reason our military shed so much blood on Europe's soil, was not to defend dirt. It was to defend and preserve a cultural heritage the was the wellspring of human flourishing of the modern era. That the Europeans themselves sometimes seemed hellbent on killing one another in carload lots did not negate the fundamental virtues of the Western heritage of faith and reason.

But those are the very virtues that most of Europe has abandoned. That is why I really want to like President Trump's Warsaw speech but cannot. It's at least 50 years behind the times and for all its rhetorical inspiration, there is almost no one left in Europe to hear it with understanding of what it really would have to mean, and I doubt that Trump himself knows, either.

Update: "... of the six founding members of what evolved into the European Union, five are now led by childless prime ministers or presidents." See more at Powerline.

Muslim attacks Christian priest during wedding

Muslim Man Runs Into Christian Wedding in Spain, Attacks Priest

Last Saturday, a 22-year-old man interrupted a Catholic wedding in the San Pablo Church in Valladolid, Spain, when he ran inside, shouted "Allahu Akhbar," and attacked the priest. The shocked couple could do nothing but watch in sheer amazement at what was happening:

Witnesses for the groom were eventually able to chase the man off the altar and out of the church building after he tried to attack several people present at the wedding. He even tried to throw Catholic sacramental objects at the churchgoers.

Police were able to identify and arrest the attacker, who will now be prosecuted for causing public disorder, threatening others, and for insulting religious sensibilities. The priest who blessed the wedding explained afterward that a "group of young troublemakers" started making noise at the back of the church. Next, one of the "young people" shouted "Allahu Akhbar" and charged the altar. "A lot of people," the priest went on to explain, "including the bride's mother, were crying, and there were people who had already jumped out of the pews because we did not know whether this person came alone or not, or if he was armed.".

It's not exactly Muslim excommunication . . .

... but it's somewhat conceptually similar (except excommunication can be reversed): "130 British imams refuse to perform funerals for London, Manchester attackers."

Will not happen for London murderers.

Over 130 imams from across the United Kingdom have said they will refuse to perform the traditional Islamic funeral prayer for the London and Manchester terror attackers. The ritual is normally carried out for every Muslim, regardless of their actions.

In what is a highly unusual move, Muslim religious leaders from different schools of Islam -- both Sunni and Shia -- issued a statement late Monday saying their pain at the suffering of the victims of Saturday's attacks had led to their decision, and they called on others imams to follow suit.

"We are deeply hurt that a spate of terror attacks have been committed in our country once more by murderers who seek to gain religious legitimacy for their actions. We seek to clarify that their reprehensible actions have neither legitimacy nor our sympathy," the statement put out by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella body representing over 500 organizations, read.

"Consequently, and in light of other such ethical principles which are quintessential to Islam, we will not perform the traditional Islamic funeral prayer for the perpetrators and we also urge fellow imams and religious authorities to withdraw such a privilege. This is because such indefensible actions are completely at odds with the lofty teachings of Islam," the statement continued.

Notice that the imams did not say there would be no funeral. They said, "we will not perform the traditional Islamic funeral prayer" at the funeral. What is the significance of of the prayer and what does its omission mean?

In Arabic, the prayer is called the Janazah Prayer. Prayerinislam.com explains,

There is a consensus among scholars that Janazah (funeral) Prayer for a deceased person whether male or female is a communal duty (fard kifayah) as the Prophet commanded Muslims to offer it ... .

With regard to the reward of offering the funeral prayer, there are many authentic narrations that prove the excellence of this prayer. For example, the Prophet (peace be upon him) said: “Whoever follows the funeral procession and offers the funeral prayer for it, will get a reward equal to one Qirat, and whoever attends it till burial, will get a reward equal to two Qirat.” It was asked, “What are two Qirat?” He replied, “Equal to two huge mountains.”

Islamreligion.com says,

A prayer service should be held for every dead Muslim, young or old, even infants who have lived who died before their birth.  Women are permitted to attend the funeral prayer just as they are permitted to perform other non obligatory prayers.  In order to keep the time between death and burial to a minimum this should be held in the same city or area in which the person died.  It is not necessary for the body to be sent to another country.

The funeral prayer should be performed in congregation, it is a rewarding act and believers should not hesitate to participate in any funeral prayer even those of people not known to them.  Prophet Muhammad encouraged this saying that whoever attended the funeral prayer until it was finished would earn rewards as hefty as a great mountain. 

Note that the deceased receives no benefit from the prayer. There is no such thing in Islam as intercessory prayer for the dead as there is in some Christian traditions. Instead, Muslims who recite the Janazah are committing a meritorious act for which Allah will reward them, not the dead person. Offering the Janazah even for deceased Muslims not known to the one praying counts as merit.

And that is the key point, because the Janazah may be rightfully offered only at funerals of Muslims, not for non-Muslims. It is not a generic funeral prayer, it is very specifically Islamic.

What the British imams have said is:

• that there is no merit before Allah for offering the prayer for the London terrorists because
• the terrorists were not Muslims when they committed their rampage.

The imams' announcement is not exactly the same as pronouncing the terrorists to be apostates, but it is not far.

This is a very positive development because, as I have explained before, Islam is what Muslims do, which is not my original insight, it is the stated position of leading Muslim scholars. So if Islam is ever truly to be a religion of peace, "excommunications" of terrorists from the Muslim fold - by Muslim clerics and scholars, not Western apologists - is the only place it can begin.

But there is a long, long way to go.

Robot priests - not fake news

It's called BlessU2, a robot that offers words of blessings from the Christian tradition. John Daniel Davidson is less than impressed, In fact, he bemoans what a robot priest portends for Germany, where the robot was set up in Wittenburg Cathedral.

Meanwhile, Christianity is disappearing from the European continent. Two years ago, Damian Thompson noted in The Spectator that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the number of Christians in Britain fell by 5.3 million, or about 10,000 a week. At that rate of decline, he wrote, “the mission of St Augustine to the English, together with that of the Irish saints to the Scots, will come to an end in 2067.”

That is the year in which the Christians who have inherited the faith of their British ancestors will become statistically invisible. Parish churches everywhere will have been adapted for secular use, demolished or abandoned. 

Our cathedral buildings will survive, but they won’t be true cathedrals because they will have no bishops. The Church of England is declining faster than other denominations; if it carries on shrinking at the rate suggested by the latest British Social Attitudes survey, Anglicanism will disappear from Britain in 2033. One day the last native-born Christian will die and that will be that.

The decline might be accelerating even beyond these dire projections. In January, the number of people attending weekly Church of England services dropped below one million for the first time ever, accounting for less than 2 percent of the population. Church attendance is now at half the level it was in the 1960s.

Thompson argues the reason for all this is secularization—and not just secularization of the wider culture but secularization occurring within the church, with liberal pastors and clergy taking up whatever latest progressive cause comes across the transom. This is a familiar story in America, too, where mainline Protestant churches, whose chief concerns these days seem to be climate change and gay marriage, are going the way of the Church of England. If current trends continue, America’s mainline churches have only 23 Easters left before they’re empty.

This is not an unusual sight across Europe:

Back to the robot. It robot does bring up some interesting avenues for discussion of creator and the created. If we humans can offer others the blessing of Christ vicariously, does the robot offer the blessings of the priest vicariously? An imago in homine perhaps, rather than imago Dei?

Can a robot be a means of grace?

Is it even possible for a priest or pastor to act as a pass-thru of a blessing (from Christ thru the priest to the robot) or is the human agent as far as a blessing can go?

Is this robot is an echo of the Tower of Babel - an attempt by part of the Church to take the place of the deity even if only in simulacrum?

However, I am also reminded of what Andy Puzder, CEO of Hardee's/Carl Jrs' fast food chain,  said last year. He said that they were installing ordering kiosks with touchscreens in a large number of restaurants to see whether they were viable.

“They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” says Puzder of swapping employees for machines. “Millennials like not seeing people. I’ve been inside restaurants where we’ve installed ordering kiosks… and I’ve actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk where there’s a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody.”

See this, too.

What will BlessU2 be like in 30 years when it is fully integrated with Artificial Intelligence and you can actually have an intelligent conversation with it that would seem indistinguishable from one with a real person? And ponder about a robot consecrating and serving Holy Communion.

I am not saying it will happen, but, well, consider this:  Neuroscience will give us what we’ve sought for decades: computers that think like we do.

I am glad I won't live to see it.

Only in Germany

Germany's Wacken hard rock festival gets beer pipeline

Of course it does! And it's to protect the environment!

Enemies who shouldn't be, enemies who must be

This is a photo of Soviet army and US Army officers shortly after World War II. They seem to be at least halfway to getting drunk, and the Soviet in the middle is probably winning the race.

In my military career I was fortunate enough to have served with officers of many foreign nations, not all actually allied nations. German officers of course were my most common foreign companions; I well remember the Prussian haughtiness of Hauptmann Schneider - but it was an act and he was a great guy.

I wrote before about Egyptian Lt. Col. Solomon, with whom I served at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he was representing the Egyptian army along with Lt. Col. Osman, both wonderful companions and great friends who were also outstanding military men.

There were many others, such as Brits and some Aussies and a handful of Indian army officers and Saudis, and many Honduran officers, who were simply superb. My personal acquaintance with Soviet officers was quite limited. The first time I met one in person was when I stepped into the corridor outside my office at the Pentagon and almost ran into two Soviet officers walking down the hall! Quickly I reached for a pistol that I wasn't wearing and then watched dumbfounded as they ambled on down the hall.

That day was not long after the failed coup attempt against Soviet general Secretary Gorbachev, which marked the beginning of the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Shortly the USSR ended and was succeeded by the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia would become Russia again, and it was officers of this post-Soviet military whom I encountered in the Pentagon. But their uniforms were the same.

The Russians were here to learn how to be an army of a democratic, free-market state, and I think that  at the time both they and we believed that this would come about. Of course, it did not. Putin came to permanent power and former die-hard communists morphed into die-hard capitalist oligarchs. (You think we have pay gaps here? Ha, we're pikers compared to the former commies of both the USSR and China.)

That being said, the Russian officers I did work with (though briefly) were great guys, too, and serious about their craft.

And herein is the issue. In 2013 wrote a review of a book by the late Lt. Col. Phillip Corso, who served in Army Intelligence at the Pentagon in the early 1960s. He wrote of the relationship between the CIA, the British MI-6 and the Soviet KGB:

They were all professional spies in a single extended agency playing the same intelligence game and trafficking in information. Information is power to be used. You don't simply give it away to your government's political leadership, whether it's the Republicans, the Tories, or the Communists, just because they tell you to. You can't trust the politicians, but you can trust other spies. At least that's what spies believe, so their primary loyalty is to their own group and the other groups playing the same game. The CIA, KGB, British Secret Service, and a whole host of other foreign intelligence agencies were loyal to themselves and to the profession first and to their respective governments last.

This kind of informal integration was not the case among the countries' armed forces, but I am confident that regular officers of the US Army, the British Army, the Soviet army, the Egyptian army, the German army, you name it, all felt a fundamental distrust of their nation's government at a very basic level, even if on the choice, responsibilities and intricacies of employing military forces. And every one of us, distrusting though we probably were, would have gone (and we did go) when told.

Even so, if you ever could have locked a group of American, Soviet, Egyptian, British, Saudi, and (even) French officers of equal rank in the same room, gave them a few cases of Coors to pass the time, and locked the door on your way out, when you came back in a couple of hours you would find a group of best friends telling each other war stories and nodding their heads at each others' tales, exclaiming, "Us, too!"

Did you ever notice that when two nations on the brink of war hold a last-gasp peace conference, the confreres are always wearing business suits? Funny that they never let the generals and colonels and captains get together and sort the thing out - maybe the suits are afraid we would. After all, of all men or women, military veterans know the futility and stupidity of war. And every one of them who might take the place of suits at a peace conference don't really trust their own governments, anyway.

For almost all of American history, we have fought enemies who shouldn't be enemies. The exceptions can be easily listed in one breath: The Nazis, the bushido Japanese and the North Koreans. The Nazis and the bushido Japanese are gone and North Korea is more dangerous than ever. But that's about it.

And now ISIS. They are enemies who must be. I cannot imagine any fellowship, any negotiation, with ISIS' officers or commanders that could come to a peaceful accommodation. ISIS seeks only to kill.

And so we must fight. After Manchester the task seems clear and unavoidable. To paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien, we may not want to fight ISIS, but ISIS definitely wants to fight us. Our choice is not whether to go to war. We are already at war. Our only choice is how the war will end.

Maybe the best war movie ever made is Russian

I thought about posting this on Memorial Day weekend but the fact that White Tiger is a Russian (post-Soviet, 2012) movie made me reconsider.

IMDB.com summarizes it thus:

Great Patriotic War, early 1940s. After barely surviving a battle with a mysterious, ghostly-white Tiger tank, Red Army Sergeant Ivan Naydenov becomes obsessed with its destruction.

Which is true as far as it goes, but this is not just a duello movie of two single-focused, even near-fanatic tank crews gunning for one another. It's not a land-borne version of The Enemy Below. White Tiger is a penetrating inquiry into war and the human condition. The German tank and the Russian protagonist are archetypes not just of soldiers anywhere, but of fallen humanity itself.

Fortunately, you can watch the whole movie, subtitled in English, right here. It seems its copyright does not extend to the United States.



At the very end is a monologue by Adolf Hitler, speaking to an unidentified man couched in shadows. Despite the identity of the speaker - and the screenplay's words in his mouth are reflective of what Hitler said and thought - the monologue is quite thought provoking, coming as it does following the last view of the Russian tank we see, and why and how we see it.

This is a very serious, compelling work of cinema. I hope you will agree.

Update Dec. 27, 2019: David Goldman posted a fairly savage review of the just-out World War 1 movie, 1917, calling it, "the worst war movie ever." The fault is not in its technical excellence of recreating the trenches and filth of the war, but in the fact that it does not tell a story.

...  the audience views the sequence of events from the perspective of a small dog dragged along on a leash behind them. ...

The camera trails the actors in what Mendes imagines to be “real time” through trenches, battlefields, ruined cities, and assorted disasters. Technically this poses great challenges, but the aesthetic outcome is a canine perspective on human events.

Time is represented as an indifferent sequence of moments, which means practically that every moment commands equal attention. In this nightmarish world there can be no drama, that is, no climax. On the contrary, every occurrence of importance to the thin narrative necessarily becomes an anti-climax.

In reply, I posted, "If you have never seen the Russian war film, "White Tiger," I cannot recommend it strongly enough," with a link here. There followed a collegial exchange:

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  David Goldman Donald Sensing, I watched the "Hitler" interview at the end of the film, and it sounds like an unwholesome Russophilic mysticism: der Traum jedwelchen europaesichen Normalburgers" is to destroy "Russland, diesen wilden und europafremden Kentaur." And the Jews, to be sure. Sounds a bit Duginesque -- it makes me very uncomfortable. Man frage sich, wes Geistes Kind es sei.

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  David Goldman Donald Sensing, a similar point is made about "White Tiger" by James Pearce in a 2018 doctoral dissertation: https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/704511/1/Pearce_2018.pdf

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  Donald Sensing David Goldman Thank you, I will read the dissertation, although I am afraid not very soon. Also, I can certainly see how a Jew would react differently to such a film than a Christian; see for example reactions to The Passion of Christ.
  
  I would never attempt to recount to you the long, deep history of western European anti-Judaism, to say nothing of what took place in eastern. And while I am not so sure that the dream of Jeder normale Europäer hätte den russischen Zentauren vernichten sollen, for sure Hitler had a lot of cooperation from the German people and non-Germans in, um, "resettling" the Jews, at minimum.
  
  With that, I think I will watch that closing interview again with your comments in mind before I read the dissertation.
  
  BTW, my German is VERY rusty, please be kind in reading this comment!
  
  And Happy New Year!

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The dissertation David recommends is, “The Use of History in Putin's Russia,” by James C. Pearce, August 2018. I have scanned only very briefly, but ISTM that Pearce cites this film and a handful of others as Russia's attempt to use the Great Patriotic War to recall Russia's (not the USSR's) glory days as a way of cementing a renewed national identity.

The Putin Agenda is determined to reconcile with the problematic and unusable past.
However, much controversy surrounds its motives and policies concerning an already
problematic period that divides the population and ruling elites alike. There are concerns that ignoring the traumatic episodes of the past will be detrimental to Russia’s development and bring great instability to the present.

Pearce writes that Tiger and some other films "are fictional yet presented as fact."

Not having read through the dissertation, I will not argue otherwise except to note that I doubt Tiger's Russian audience really swallowed that the white Tiger tank was historically genuine or that the movie's Russian hero could literally mind-meld with destroyed T-34s. That the movie does serve such a purpose in Russia as Pearce describes, though, I do not dispute.

That said, Pearce could have cast a wider net. While his dissertation is certainly not a lengthy movie review, some other candidates that might have illustrated his point better are:

• Tanks for Stalin, 2018

• 1940. A prototype of a new cutting edge tank is being taken on a secret mission to Moscow, to Comrade Stalin. Soon the cross-country run turns into a ruthless race.

• Battery Number One, 2018

• The film takes place in August 1944 when Soviet troops are moving through eastern Poland. Under orders to ensure safe passage for the army over a bridge near an abandoned monastery, Lieutenant Egorov and his battalion discover a makeshift orphanage for deaf-mute children hiding in the monastery with their teacher Eve, and are faced with the dilemma of compromising the refugees or executing their orders blindly.

• The Dawns Here Are Quiet, 2015, a four-part TV series

• Based on the eponymous book by Boris Vasilyev, the film is set in Karelia (North-West of Russia, near Finland) in 1941 during WWII. In a beautiful and quiet wilderness far from the front-line there is an anti-aircraft artillery point, where corporal Vaskov is stationed with a group of many young women in training. One of the women while sneaking from camp to visit her young son sees two German paratroopers. Vaskov takes five of the women to stop the two paratroopers, but finds sixteen paratroopers instead, leaving the small group of patriots to engage the enemy in an unequal fight. 

And for good measure, a leap back to World War 1 with 2015's Battalion.

February 1917 revolution has affected mode of life in Russia and changed the course of Great War. Monarch has abdicated. In trenches, were the confrontation with Germans lasts for several years, Bolsheviks are very active with their propaganda. They call for making peace with enemy. Russian officers can actually do nothing without approval of so-called Soldiers Committees. The army is just near the stage of complete degradation. By order of Russian Provisional Government, attempting to strengthen the spirit, the female Death Battalion is established. In charge of the Battalion - Cavalier of St. George Maria Bochkareva. Death Battalion give the lead of courage, fortitude and composure, stiffen the spirit of soldiers and prove, that each of the female hero is worthy of the Warrior Title.

There is an historical nugget in each of these, though perhaps in a way that a McDonald's chicken nugget represents a whole chicken. Though most take place during the USSR era, the character emphasis is on Russians rather than the multiple ethnicities and nationalities that comprised the Soviet empire. These are, as Pearce observes, movies about Russia and Russians at their finest.

Battalion is based on real events nearing the end of Russia's fighting the Kaiser's army, when Russia really did send battalions of female soldiers into battle, where, as the movie suggests somewhat ambiguously, they were slaughtered. (It seems that infantry women cannot successfully fight hand to hand with infantry men after all, which I sort of covered in my post, "The Infantry Woman Shortage."

Thanks to David Goldman for his comments and suggestion!