Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 30, 2016
On June 30, 1966, fifty years ago, that noble Christian movement inextricably connected to the emancipation of slaves, compassion for animals, and temperance in the consumption of alcohol – “feminism” – began to die. On that day, the National Organization for Women, a front group for radical leftists, was founded. Truly creepy characters like Betty Friedan, who as a Stalinist picketed the White House to stop America from helping Britain fight Hitler, infested this vile creation from the outset.
The pattern to anyone familiar with radical leftism is clear: dream up names for organizations that either tell nothing of the Marxist tilt (e.g., American Civil Liberties Union) or infest and dominate once respectable organizations (e.g., Sierra Club) and then turn the whole organization into a front group to attack America or Judeo-Christian values or free enterprise.
Feminism once was a noble movement. It was overtly Christian, and it was inextricably intertwined with several other movements like ending slavery, preventing cruelty to animals, and encouraging temperance in the consumption of alcohol. Feminism was emphatically not an advocacy group for women, and to the extent that it spoke on the subject, feminism insisted that women must assume the burdens as well as the privileges of citizenship.
The Stalinist replacement for feminism that ugly monstrosities like NOW represented was rather womenism, a blatantly man-hating, utterly self-serving, and emphatically anti-Christian group without the slightest interest in justice or equality or even protecting women. The function of women to NOW is like the function of blacks to the NAACP: peasant levies, conscript armies, manacled slaves shoved roughly into a battle most women never wanted to fight.
NOW, like all the other variety of Marxist fronts, strictly adheres to this old Marxist maxim: “The worse, the better” and its close corollary “The more innocent, the more guilty.” The more wretched the women, the more powerful NOW becomes – and power, here and always, is the sole real aim of leftism. Creating gaping fissures between men and women suits the interests of womenists quite well. Happy marriages, joyful parenthood, and peace between the sexes defeat everything that womenism represents.
Beyond profiting from misery, NOW, like all other incarnations of leftism, spews rhetoric marinated in mendacity. Anyone remotely acquainted with the hideous history of militant abortionism knows what Bernard Nathanson revealed about the deliberate lies told to advance “the cause” – lies that make the corruption of Planned Parenthood look positively Pollyannaish by comparison.
Womenism is pockmarked with fabrications, inventions, and lies. Because truth means nothing to womenists and because dishonesty is so quickly believed by those told that they are “victims,” womenism scarcely has to correct itself or answer for its falsehoods. Often it is the producer of bogus data, and it hides the source of that data or so obscures the origin that it is almost impossible to decipher the convoluted paths of origin of these data.
Because womenism is not about women, but only about anti-Americanism and anti-Christianism, the womenist hacks at NOW are as silent about the true horrors faced by women throughout the non-Christian world as Betty Friedan was about the nightmarish conditions women endured in Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and Hindu India.
Feminists like Katherine Mayo and Soong May-ling and Clare Booth Luce, all deeply religious and all brave and brilliant advocates of what was right, fought the true misogyny of Hindu India and pre-Christian China and Stalinist Russia. This advocacy, however, served no purpose besides helping protect the basic dignity of women around the world so womenists have ignored these great champions. Womenists are invariably cowards, taking potshots from tenured professorships in such nonsensical disciplines as “Women’s Studies” in rich private universities.
Womenism exists today largely because its disciples have created generations of women utterly dependent upon a sense of victimhood emotionally and economically. That is, in fact, anti-feminism, and it is a repudiation for all the good things feminism once represented.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 27, 2016
The Madness of Frau Merkel
If we’ve learned anything in the last eight years it’s that supposedly smart people can be suicidally stupid, and that idiot savants can easily rationalize sabotaging their own nations.
Obama isn’t the only elite messiah who favors national suicide for past sins, though he is certainly the blindest, most self-righteous and willfully destructive one in American history.
Then there is Frau Angela Merkel — the Chancellor and Chief Guilt-Tripper of Germany. Frau Merkel shares Obama’s fantasy world, where only the Good People rule and the rest follow orders. The EU even has a slogan for it: it’s called the “democracy deficit” — meaning that ordinary voters have no power whatsoever. Yes, the EU is spreading love and peace all over, but — shucks — there’s still a ways to go.
The EU’s seemingly suicidal policy deliberately aims to dilute the percentage of ethnic Europeans in their native countries, to empower the new Franco-German capital in Brussels. This is exactly what Otto von Bismarck did in the 1800s to destroy the provincial capitals of German-speaking Europe, and to centralize all power in one Reich in the Prussian capital of Berlin. Fanatical German nationalism, xenophobia and militarism in the 20th century were a direct product of Bismarck’s imperial unification policy.
Which is why the EU’s kleptocracy can actually destroy the economy of southern Europe without triggering a voter revolt. The elite has knowingly imported more than 50 million Muslims from the tribal backwaters of Pakistan and the Middle East, to serve as welfare voters for Eurosocialist parties, especially in capital cities like Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin. The EU has also imposed the mass-media cult fantasy of Political Correctness over its colonial peoples; and it has been nice enough to export PC to the United States by way of our Eurosocialist universities.
By now normal voters in Europe are so far removed from the center of power that they’ve basically given up. They are utterly powerless, because they will be scapegoated as Nazis if they ever rebel against the new Ruling Class. By now they are used to following orders, just like the olden times.
So a few weeks ago Frau Merkel could order the opening of Europe’s borders to hundreds of thousands of fraudulent Syrian “rapefugees,” mostly young men who are even now marauding through Europe’s formerly civilized cities. You can see them viciously beating upyoung women on YouTube; and Europe’s present will certainly be our future, if the IslamoLeft has its way.
Two German judges have now declared Frau Merkel’s open borders actions to be unconstitutional — but hey, who’s gonna do anything about it? By now those ravening invaders have gone to ground, dumped their fake Syrian passports, signed up to vote for Islamo-Left parties, and applied for welfare asylum as persecuted victims.
You don’t need a crystal ball to see what’s next: See the rape epidemic in Norway and Sweden for starters. Or, as Frau Merkel charmingly put it, “Germany will have to live with a higher number of criminals.” We’re pretty sure that Obama believes the same thing, but he hasn’t actually said it yet. Same policy, same ideology, same suicidal outcome.
Frau Merkel has learned from Obama that you can spread disaster in your wake and still blame your own voters, and that, in the mass-media-cult of the Islamo-Left, nobody will hold you responsible. On the contrary.
The newest Left-Fascist alliance will cheer on your sabotage of your own people because they know that ordinary folks can’t be trusted to know what’s best.
Obama has a lifelong mission to punish America for the long-ago sin of slavery. In jihadist slang the same thing is called Darb al Harb, or the House of War. It means that you and I are their targeted enemy, like it or not, just as Saul Alinsky wrote in his little book.
Napoleon Chagnon is the most important scientific anthropologist of our time, because he has exposed the true nature of primitive tribal warfare. (See his 1988 Science article called “Life history, blood revenge, and warfare in a tribal population.”)
For a hundred years field anthropologists have watched tribal warfare going on, year after year, but they were not allowed to publish the truth. Leading anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ashley Montagu simply lied about the violent tribes they knew about.
In reality, as we now know from Chagnon and many others, group aggression is the norm among human clans all over the world. Gang warfare isn’t just happening in inner city Chicago. Up to a third of adult males in traditional tribes die as a result of group or individual violence.
After a lifetime of field work with the hyper-aggressive Yanamamo Indians of Venezuela, Chagnon has made a compelling scientific case that warfare is almost universal in human tribes, and that the clearly understood goal of group violence is to kidnap and rape women, kill adult males, take loot and slaves, and run away for more of the same.
If up to a third of males are violently killed every generation, with another third in the next and so on, in time, human genes will favor preparedness for war.
And yet — warlike tribes also make peace among accepted in-groups, while reserving their aggression for out-groups. The fact is that humans are prepared both for war and peace.
And that is indeed what anthropologists report about the warrior tribes of New Guinea, South and North America, the Vikings, the Mongols, the Khoi San of Africa, the Middle East and all the rest.
Now get this: The great Arabian Desert has long been populated by war-making tribes, just like the ones Napoleon Chagnon studied in the field. Mohammed was a desert raider (and occasional trader) who talked to the Archangel Gabriel in his dreams, and who naturally produced a holy book that reflected his own tribal culture.
(A good source on all this is Lawrence of Arabia’s story of his time in the Arabian Desert in WW1, which included being raped by one of his allies. Lawrence never went back.)
In primitive tribal warfare, women belong to the victorious male or gang of males by right of conquest, as the divinely ordained spoils of war, along with male slaves and loot. According to Chagnon, Yanamamo men freely boast about the sexual benefits of warfare. Raping the daughters of an enemy clan is glorified. To a warrior every raped woman means both a practical and genetic victory over an enemy clan, in the everlasting Hobbesian violence of the primitive world.
Rape is a crime in more civilized cultures, and a major cause for shame, guilt and punishment. But to primitive tribal males, it is the greatest sign of victory, as long as rape is committed against an enemy clan.
Therefore, what Angela Merkel recently did, in the eyes of the invading “refugees,” is to signal tribal surrender to an essentially primitive war cult.
You may want to read that sentence again, and maybe check Chagnon’s historic Science article for evidence. The web is the biggest scientific library in history, and there is enough good anthropology to balance the usual lies from the usual suspects.
In Quranic warfare, killing, looting and rape are justified and even commanded.
The rules of holy warfare have been debated by various priesthoods since the early caliphates, and they are now enshrined in written codes of conduct in the name of Allah. Muslim imams and mullahs are not shy about glorifying Mohammed’s life as a tribal warrior, and as a model for all men. Islam has simply incorporated the tactics of ancient tribal warfare into its holy books.
Last year the Saudi Wahhabi priesthood publicly declared that ISIS is religiously justified in its endless bloody crimes, especially if the victims are Shi’ites, Christians, Yazidis, atheist Europeans like Frau Merkel, and all the rest. If you don’t worship Allah in the Wahhabi way, you’re on the plate for dinner. Their enemy Shi’ites believe the same thing about the Wahhabis, of course.
If you go back far in human history, this is part of standard human misbehavior — just as peace making is also based in human nature. We are not doomed to kill each other forever. We can, and often we have actually learned to be better, as pointed out by good scientific sources like Harvard’s Steven Pinker and science journalist Nicholas Wade.
Globally, humanity has learned to reduce our tendency to glorify fighting and war. That is why civilizing law codes are so profoundly important in our history, from the Code of Hammurabi to the Mosaic Ten Commandments and the many legal codes of genuinely civilized societies. Humans can certainly be evil, yes, but we also have a capacity for good.
What Chagnon has taught us is that rape is often the most important motivation for tribal war. In cruel Darwinian terms, rape is a way for one clan to spread its genes to others, thereby passing on a genetic preparedness for sexually-motivated violence to future generations.
The tragedy of Islam is to be enormously successful in its conquests since the 7th century, and to fail miserably, time and time again, in building genuine civilization.
That is why we are seeing a resurgent jihadist Islam today, after seventy years of modernism. It is another reactionary fallback to the tribal past.
Persia had a glorious culture before it was conquered by Arab Muslims. The Byzantine Empire was one of the two apostolic sources of Orthodox Christianity, before it was stamped out by Muslim Berbers, Tuaregs, and Turks in Northern Africa. The Buddhist monasteries of Northern India were massacred by the Ghurid Muslims around the year 1200, so that today there are not many Buddhists left in India, where Gautama Buddha first taught. Islam is profoundly reactionary, the most violent and reactionary belief system on earth. Check the facts if you doubt it.
When Stalin’s Soviet armies conquered East Germany at the end of WW II, they committed mass rape, like the Imperial Japanese in Nanking. The Japanese practiced kidnapping women as sex slaves. No doubt some Allied troops committed rape as well — but rape was a crime by the military codes of conduct of the Allied armies. It was not glorified but punished.
The difference between civilized and primitive war is in the codes of conduct that are actually enforced, often with the death penalty.
Civilization is all about rational codes of conduct and their enforcement. That is why the Laws of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments, and Blackstone on English Common Law are so historically important.
Angela Merkel is a Eurosocialist who was brought up in Marxist East Germany. Merkel was deeply indoctrinated in Political Correctness, the most recent political mythology of the European Union.
But the Muslim code of conduct is the Quran, which emerged out of the universal tribal warfare of the Arabian Desert of the 7th th century. Mohammed was a tribal chief who transformed that culture into Islam.
Islam means “submission,” — not “peace” — and a Muslim is “one who submits.” As in obeying military orders, just like the goose-stepping armies of Europe in World War I.
Nazi soldiers used to yell “Zum Befehl!” (By your Order!) to their officers when they were told to commit some fresh horror. Every two-bit corporal could speak in the name of Hitler, who had absolute power. In Islam your local imam or tribal emir has absolutely power to order life and death, in lieu of direct orders from above. That belief gives mere human beings divine and absolute justification to do their worst.
Allah commands war against the infidel to his believers. Slave taking, killing, robbing, and general mayhem are commanded in the Qur’an.
Merkel and Obama either know those facts already, and are working in collusion with jihad, or they are so mentally fixated in goofy leftism that they will never learn the truth.
Either way they send out constant signals of surrender to every jihad-indoctrinated male in the world.
Over the centuries Europe has always fallen for wave after wave of delusional beliefs, all liable to explode into major wars. The wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had scarcely stopped smoking when Frederick the Great invented nationalistic militarism in Prussia, while the French invented the guillotine, to ensure universal liberty, equality, and brotherhood. Which then kicked off the Napoleonic Wars, then the Franco-Prussian War of revenge, then WW1 and 2, followed by the Soviet Empire, which also acquired its Marxist cult from Germany.
Each international slaughter came after years of media-driven indoctrination into some world-saving, self-aggrandizing ideology, first religious, then imperialistic and militaristic, then Napoleonic, followed by German campaigns of revenge against France, then two compulsive replays in the two world wars, then Soviet imperialism, and now the European Union.
The grand new EU claims to have the answer to war and peace forever. It’s not a secret that the EU wants to run the world through international institutions like the UN, the most corrupt collection of thugs, genociders and rapists on earth.
The EU is of course a messianic cult like all the others, with the difference that previous European delusions killed foreigners; but this time the ruling class has declared war on its own peoples.
Frau Merkel may not look like a black Chicago Machine politician, but in their hearts they are twin souls.
Nude Statues Covered in Rome for Visit of Iran’s Rouhani, Italians Outraged
Out of respect for Iranian President Hassam Rouhani, Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi had a series of nude statues at the Capitoline Museum completely covered for the leader’s visit Tuesday, which has a number of Italians hopping mad.
These were no mere fig leaves, but immense white wooden boxes that completely shielded the offending statues from the sensitive eyes of President Rouhani and the Iranian media train that has followed his trip to Italy, Italian news sources revealed. Twitter also gave its own insight:
Moreover, at the banquet held in Rouhani’s honor, no wine was served at table to anyone, out of respect for the Muslim rule of abstinence.
Italian citizens were furious at what they considered an affront, and some have suggested that the error was serious enough to cause the Prime Minister political problems.
As one article noted, Italy is already playing host to the president of a regime that holds the world record for executions; that imprisons, tortures and kills political prisoners; that humiliates women; and that for decades has commissioned the assassination of dissidents. What need was there—the piece asks—to add further humiliation to the already questionable call of receiving the Iranian leader at all?
“To cover the statues of the Capitoline Museums, to cover and symbolically renounce our art and our culture,” the piece continues, “means the surrender of a country and a national and global embarrassment that no Italian citizen deserved and no business deal justifies.”
Prior to the visit to the Museum, Rouhani reportedly signed contracts with Italy worth up to $18.4 billion.
“The decision to cover the nudity of the statues at the Capitoline Museums,” said Fabio Rampelli of the Alleanza Nazionale party, “is worthy of the worst Islamist terrorist. It was a decision that offends Western culture and the supremacy of art as a vehicle of culture and freedom.”
Another essay similarly complained that Italy had “bowed down” to Rouhani and art had been “sacrificed” to a new relationship between Iran and Italy. The “astonishing tribute to the Islamic culture” was even more offensive, the article noted, by “the small amount of time dedicated in official talks to the subject of human rights and of Iranian hostilities toward Israel.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 28, 2015
One of the frequently cited quips in the halls of Congress is that politics makes for strange bedfellows, meaning that some alliances between Democrats and Republicans, especially given today’s toxic environment in Washington, are hard to fathom. However, perhaps even more difficult to understand is the strange affinity that has developed over the past two decades between Islamists – radical Muslims – and the American progressive movement, or what Michael Walsh has termed the “unholy left.”
At first glance, the two entities seem utterly different – one proceeding from the darker recesses of Islamic culture, and the other a seemingly quintessential product of American idealism. In fact, however, what we find between the two political movements is a confluence of interests and perspectives on a variety of matters. Indeed, often the affinity of these two outlooks is frightening.
For instance, both share an animus bordering on hatred for Christianity and Judaism, with the secular progressives trying to expunge Christians from public life, while Islamists yearn to annihilate Jews. Certainly, academic progressives do nothing to discourage the anti-Semitic hatred of Muslims from being expressed on American campuses, as David Horowitz recently pointed out. Why, he wonders, do prominent American universities, such as Brandeis and UCLA, permit offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood to have free rein on their campuses? “Any other group that preached hatred of ethnic groups or supported barbaric terrorists who slaughter men, women and children as part of a demented mission to cleanse the earth of infidels would face campus sanctions, disciplinary action, and be charged with conduct code violations.”
But apparently this doesn’t bother secular progressives, who dominate American higher education. Quite the contrary: progressives luxuriate in moralistic narcissism whenever presented with the opportunity to condemn “primitive thinkers” for “Islamophobia,” sometimes even after radical Muslims have perpetrated some horrific attack, as in the Fort Hood massacre. And other times, it just takes a youngster falsely accused of bringing a bomb to school, which turned out to be a homemade clock, to trigger progressive sensibilities: “Finally,” crowed The Daily Beast, “the Muslim hero America has been waiting for.” In fact, Ahmed Mohamed’s little exercise earned him a visit to the White House and a note of encouragement from Hillary Clinton. He later departed with his family for the apparently more agreeable clime of Qatar, a Muslim country. Perhaps officials are more tolerant there.
They’re not, of course, nor are secular progressives in America or radical Islamists everywhere. Neither believes in free speech, as progressives put clamps on expression wherever they can, especially in higher education, by forbidding outside speakers to lecture and by doubling down on trigger warnings, microaggressions, miniscule free speech zones, and “safe places” for suffering souls overcome with a case of the vapors after being exposed to a dissident thought. Meanwhile, Islamist punishments for blasphemy are unforgiving, brutal, and nefarious.
Further, secular progressives and radical Islamists hold America in contempt, and they favor rule by an unaccountable elite – an administrative-bureaucratic class of experts, in the progressive case, a vision that has lurked in the progressive imagination since Teddy Roosevelt’s days, while Muslims insist on obeisance to sharia enforced by religious overseers. Both aspire to totalitarian rule under dictatorships of those who are self-selected by political or religious criteria. These presiding masters are radically anti-modern and yearn to establish or recreate primeval societies based on apocalyptic rants of environmental cultists on the one hand and atavistic seventh-century radicals on the other. Both movements lie habitually, with the assurance that deception is justified by the needs of their religious-political movements, and with the assurance of never having to face the consequences of their words and actions. Finally, both are supported by very large segments of their societies.
Of course, there are differences as well, several of which are important. For instance, radical Islamists view Western libertinism with abhorrence, do not tolerate homosexuality or feminism, and worship a higher being – all of which are anathema to secular progressive ideology. Indeed, in the long run, progressives could no more live under sharia than Islamists could celebrate the gay lifestyle. But this matters little in the short run, during which each side finds the other useful for combating a common foe – a constitutional democracy with Judeo-Christian roots. This means that secular progressives and Islamists will continue to work in concert, indefinitely, for all the reasons cited above. And in spite of isolated setbacks, they are winning.
Can a Dying Civilization Defeat ISIS and Radical Islam?
By any measure, we are losing the war against ISIS and radical Islam. A bigger problem is we do not yet realize we are losing or why. Their legions are growing, their ambitions are apocalyptic, and our resolve is as strong as silly putty.
Without question, our military is superior to any other on earth and we could inflict devastating damage to ISIS if we unleashed our military forces against them. But we are not going to do that—not today, not next month and not after the next atrocity strikes Cleveland, Phoenix or Richmond.
We have a President and his designated replacement-in-waiting who think “climate change” is a greater threat than Islamists with nuclear weapons, and that the way to defeat squads of suicide bombers is to welcome their brothers, sisters and cousins as our neighbors and give them the right to vote.
But we have a deeper problem than our commander in chief being AWOL. If you ask yourself how he can get away with never uttering the words “radical Islam,” then you might begin uncovering the deeper problem: Obama is not alone in willfully avoiding the truth about an enemy sworn to our destruction. He has many accomplices and coconspirators.
If we are honest we must face a very dark and sobering fact: The outcome of this war is far from certain. We are proud of being a nation of can-do optimists, but we are also a nation in denial about a culture in a tailspin.
The real enemy is not “over there” in Syria and Iraq, or in Paris or London. The enemy is already here in our homeland, and I am not speaking of terrorist cells, Syrian refugees, or radical imams. I am speaking of the accelerating rot in our own culture.
Our secular culture is adrift in a sea of relativism, escapism, and self-indulgent inanities, with our media and entertainment elites leading the parade.
Where were you, Daddy, when we were waging the war on terror?” Oh, well, I was watching reality TV. On TV, the good guys always defeat the bad guys. And I can always change the channel.
In this besotted condition, we are ill equipped to fight an enemy full of passion, idealism and self-confidence. Islamist suicide bombers believe they are dying for a higher purpose, the greater glory of Allah. What, exactly, are our ideals? The freedom to enjoy pornography and polygamy and 24-hour pizza delivery?
The war with ISIS and its Islamist allies is what historian Samuel P. Huntington called a “clash of civilizations” in a book by that title in 1996.
Tocqueville warned us 200 years ago that we would never be defeated by an invader, but we could abandon liberty by adopting a “soft tyranny” of democratic corruption.
The early 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter gave a similar warning about the inevitable corruption of morals that comes with capitalism’s triumph. If everything is permitted in an open marketplace, higher values will be replaced by cheaper ones— and there is no principle within pure capitalism to halt that cultural degeneration.
Then in our generation, along comes “multiculturalism” to teach that there are no superior cultures, only different ones. Witchcraft is as much a legitimate personal religion as Christianity or Buddhism if that is what turns you on, and polygamy is just another “lifestyle” with its own cable TV channel.
The great Russian novelist Alexandr Solzhenitsyn saw this deepening hollowness in the West as a global development spanning five centuries, with Soviet Communism only a symptom of lost souls. In his Templeton Lecture in 1983, long before the rise of radical Islam, he warned:
“It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make dally concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss.”
ISIS and radical Islam have declared war on us not because of anything we have done—not because we are a friend to Israel and not because we have not yet toppled the bloody Syrian dictator Assad. ISIS and radical Islamists hate us for who we are. The irony is, we ourselves do not know who we are.
The Chinese philosopher Sun Tsu said it best in The Art of War:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
ISIS hates the West as an abominable nest of infidels, infidels who reject the Quran and Shariah Law, and so must be annihilated. We are the obstacle to the new Caliphate. OKAY— got it: We stand against the Caliphate. But what do we stand for? What is our alternative ideal to the Islamist ideal? Those happy optimists who think this is a largely academic question should consider the generational dimension to cultural identities and dissatisfactions.
While radical Islam may indeed hold little attraction for the large majority of Muslim immigrants and refugees now relocating in Europe and America, it will be different matter for thousands of their children. The mastermind behind the Paris terror attack was the son of successful, fully assimilated Moroccan immigrants.
A growing number of reliable public opinion polls of Muslim populations (Pew, Gallup, Rasmussen, among others) reveal that 13% to 32% of Muslims have a positive view of ISIS — as do 17% of Syrian refugees.
So, it is both reasonable and prudent to ask ourselves — what percentage of the children of several million Muslim migrants will choose the values of our ascendant secular hedonism over the allure of “true Islam”? One percent of two million is 20,000 potential jihadists.
Radical Islam’s principles are out there for all to see if they open their eyes. But what are our principles? In truth, they are up for grabs.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 29, 2012
“Women should surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs”
“The tragedy of the world in which we live is that we have become apostates. Many have abandoned the treasures given to us by revelation — the supernatural” Alice Von Hildebrand
Which way?
The battle of the sexes is alive and well. According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.
Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.
The so-called dearth of good men (read: marriageable men) has been a hot subject in the media as of late. Much of the coverage has been in response to the fact that for the first time in history, women have become the majority of the U.S. workforce. They’re also getting most of the college degrees. The problem? This new phenomenon has changed the dance between men and women.
As the author of three books on the American family and its intersection with pop culture, I’ve spent thirteen years examining social agendas as they pertain to sex, parenting, and gender roles. During this time, I’ve spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women. And in doing so, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a subculture of men who’ve told me, in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married. When I ask them why, the answer is always the same.
Women aren’t women anymore.
To say gender relations have changed dramatically is an understatement. Ever since the sexual revolution, there has been a profound overhaul in the way men and women interact. Men haven’t changed much – they had no revolution that demanded it – but women have changed dramatically.
In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they fwere taught to believe was rightfully theirs.
Now the men have nowhere to go.
It is precisely this dynamic – women good/men bad – that has destroyed the relationship between the sexes. Yet somehow, men are still to blame when love goes awry. Heck, men have been to blame since feminists first took to the streets in the 1970s.
But what if the dearth of good men, and ongoing battle of the sexes, is – hold on to your seats – women’s fault?
You’ll never hear that in the media. All the articles and books (and television programs, for that matter) put women front and center, while men and children sit in the back seat. But after decades of browbeating the American male, men are tired. Tired of being told there’s something fundamentally wrong with them. Tired of being told that if women aren’t happy, it’s men’s fault.
Contrary to what feminists like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, say, the so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families – it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them.
It’s all so unfortunate – for women, not men. Feminism serves men very well: they can have sex at hello and even live with their girlfriends with no responsibilities whatsoever.
It’s the women who lose. Not only are they saddled with the consequences of sex, by dismissing male nature they’re forever seeking a balanced life. The fact is, women need men’s linear career goals – they need men to pick up the slack at the office – in order to live the balanced life they seek.
So if men today are slackers, and if they’re retreating from marriage en masse, women should look in the mirror and ask themselves what role they’ve played to bring about this transformation.
Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.
If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on March 11, 2012
The great Catholic philosopher and theologian and former professor, Alice Von Hidebrandsays:
„Women Can Escape a Trap by Imitating Mary’s Strength and Humility“
Women in the secularized world need to be reminded that fulfilling their maternal role is infinitely valuable in God’s sight, says the wife of philosopher Dietrich Von Hildebrand.
Alice Von Hildebrand, author of “The Privilege of Being a Woman” and a philosopher in her own right, shared with ZENIT how every woman can find supernatural strength in what feminism perceives as her weakness and look to Mary as a model of perfect femininity.
Von Hildebrand earned her doctorate in philosophy at Fordham University and is professor emeritus of Hunter College of the City University of New York.
Q: What inspired you to write this book?
Von Hildebrand: The poison of secularism has penetrated deeply into our society. It did so by stages. Men were its first victims: They became more and more convinced that in order to be someone they had to succeed in the world. Success means money, power, fame, recognition, creativity, inventiveness, etc.
Many of them sacrificed their family life in order to achieve this goal: They came home just to relax or have fun. Work was the serious part of their life.
Innumerable marriages have been ruined by this attitude. Wives rightly felt that they were mere appendixes — a necessary relaxation. Husbands had little time for loving exchanges, as they were too busy. The children saw very little of their fathers. That wives suffered was not only understandable, but also legitimate.
Q: Why do women need to be convinced that it is good to be a woman?
Von Hildebrand: The amazing thing is that feminism, instead of making women more profoundly aware of the beauty and dignity of their role as wives as mothers, and of the spiritual power that they can exercise over their husbands, convinced them that they, too, had to adopt a secularist mentality: They, too, should enter the work force; they, too, should prove to themselves that they were someone by getting diplomas, competing with men in the work market, showing that they were their equals and — when given opportunities — could outsmart them.
They let themselves become convinced that femininity meant weakness. They started to look down upon virtues — such as patience, selflessness, self-giving, tenderness — and aimed at becoming like men in all things. Some of them even convinced themselves that they had to use coarse language in order to show the “strong” sex that they were not the fragile, delicate, insignificant dolls that men believed them to be.
The war of the sexes was on. Those who fell into the traps of feminism wanted to become like men in all things and sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. They became blind to the fact that men and women, though equal in ontological dignity, were made different by God’s choice: Male and female he made them. Different and complementary.
Each sex has its strengths; each sex has its weaknesses. According to God’s admirable plan, the husband is to help his wife overcome these weaknesses so that all the treasures of her femininity will come to full bloom, and vice versa.
How many men truly become “themselves” thanks to the love of their wives. How may wives are transformed by their husband’s strength and courage.
The tragedy of the world in which we live is that we have become apostates. Many have abandoned the treasures given to us by revelation — the supernatural.
Original sin was essentially an attack on the hierarchy of values: Man wanted to become like God, without God. The punishment was terrible: Man’s body revolted against his soul. Today, this reversal of the hierarchy of values goes so far that Peter Singer denies man’s superiority over animals, and that baby whales are saved while human babies are murdered.
The whole is topsy-turvy: Marriages break down; many do not even consider getting married; partnership lasts only as long as it satisfies one. Unnatural relationships so severely condemned by Plato are fashionable and claim their rights to be put on the same level as those that God has ordered.
Q: How can women’s purported weakness be seen as a source strength?
Von Hildebrand: Granted that from a naturalistic point of view, men are stronger: not only because they are physically stronger, but also because they are more creative, more inventive and more productive — most great works in theology, philosophy and fine arts have been made by men. They are the great engineers, the great architects.
But the Christian message is that, valuable as all these inventions are, they are dust and ashes compared to every act of virtue. Because a woman by her very nature is maternal — for every woman, whether married or unmarried, is called upon to be a biological, psychological or spiritual mother — she knows intuitively that to give, to nurture, to care for others, to suffer with and for them — for maternity implies suffering — is infinitely more valuable in God’s sight than to conquer nations and fly to the moon.
When one reads the life of St. Teresa of Avila or St. Thérèse of Lisieux, one is struck by the fact that they constantly refer to their “weakness.” The lives of these heroic women — and there are many — teach us that an awareness and acceptance of one’s weakness, coupled with a boundless confidence in God’s love and power, grant these privileged souls a strength that is so great because it is supernatural.
Natural strength cannot compete with supernatural strength. This is why Mary, the blessed one, is “strong as an army ready for battle.” And yet, she is called “clemens, pia, dulcis Virgo Maria.”
This supernatural strength explains — as mentioned by Dom Prosper Gueranger in “The Liturgical Year” — that the devil fears this humble virgin more than God because her supernatural strength that crushes his head is more humiliating for him than God’s strength.
This is why the Evil One is today launching the worst attack on femininity that has ever taken place in the history of the world. For coming closer to the end of time, and knowing that his final defeat is coming, he redoubles his efforts to attack his one great enemy: the woman. It says in Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmity between you and the woman.” The final victory is hers, as seen in the woman crowned with the sun.
Q: Why do you think women have moral power?
Von Hildebrand:The mission of women today is of crucial importance. In some way, they have the key to sanity — the first step toward a conversion. For supernature is based on nature, and unless we go back to a natural soundness, the sublimity of the supernatural message will be lost to most of us.
Why do they have the key? Because their influence on men is enormous when they truly understand their role and mission. Again and again I hear priests say that they owe their vocation to their grandmother or mother.
St. Monica, in collaboration with God, brought back her wayward son to God. St. Bernard’s mother, St. Francis de Sales’ mother — who was only 15 years older than he — and St. John Bosco’s mother were key factors in their spiritual way to holiness.
Q: How is Mary a model of femininity?
Von Hildebrand: Women have the key because they are the guardians of purity. This is already clearly indicated by the structure of their bodies, which chastely hides their intimate organs. Because their organs are “veiled,” indicating their mystery and sacredness, women have the immense privilege of sharing the sex of the blessed one: Mary, the most holy of all creatures.
Feminism began in Protestant countries, for the plain reason that they had turned their backs on Christ’s mother, as if the Savior of the world would feel deprived of the honor given to his beloved Mother.
Mary — so gloriously referred to in the Apocalypse — is the model of women. It is by turning to her, praying to her and contemplating her virtues that women will find their way back to the beauty and dignity of their mission.
Q: How did writing this book help you grow in appreciation of being a woman?
Von Hildebrand: Writing this book has been a privilege. It gave me a unique opportunity to meditate on the greatness of the woman’s mission, following in the steps of the Holy Virgin.
Mary taught us two rules leading to holiness. One is: “I am the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done to me according to thy word.” This indicates that the woman’s mission is to let herself be fecundated by grace — holy receptivity. The second is: “Do whatever he tells you.”
This is the holy program that the Church offers us. No doubt, if women understood this message, marriage, the family and the Church would overcome the terrible crisis affecting us. As the liturgy says, “God has put salvation in the hands of a woman.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on March 10, 2012
From Romeo and Juliet to the one-night stand— modern societies are torn between the ideal of fidelity and the thirst for freedom.
Most civilizations have been based on some comprehensive idea of justice, but ours alone is based on love, both in its religion and in the principles that guide its relations between the sexes. Christianity and chivalry, from which our practices in part descend, recognized clearly that love (like freedom) must be disciplined and may require sacrifice. Today both of these moral commitments—indeed, all forms of commitment among us—are rather vestigial, and the whole idea of love is in danger of sinking to the level of sentimental tosh.
Modern Western states have, of course, always been graded into various kinds of class and status, but they have also been notably individualistic. The result has been a freedom of association, an exploration of the passions, that could not generally happen where a society conformed to comprehensive rules of justice, such as a caste system or a tribal hierarchy. Little wonder that the packaging of our Western morals as “rights” has been found so disruptive in other cultures.
The most common form of society has always been one in which social status tells people where they stand in relation to one another. Seniority, sex or just brute force located everyone in a hierarchy. As bad as the ranking might be, people knew where they stood. Human beings often prefer such knowledge to the hazards of a free society, for freedom leaves us at the mercy of the likes and dislikes of others and also (no less fickle) our own likes and dislikes.
We in the West, then, have opened ourselves up to the risks of both love and freedom. That means that our societies are (as Tocqueville noted) vastly more vulnerable to changing manners and mores. As we have lost a sense of the rigors that love requires, and the discipline that freedom needs, we have evolved, over little more than two generations, from the consuming passion of “Romeo and Juliet” to the fleeting encounter of the one-night stand. Falling in love has given way to endless testing and experiment. Now two French academics offer to make sense of our new situation.
The novelist and philosopher Pascal Bruckner’s “The Paradox of Love” is a brilliant account of the sexual muddles of our time. Paradox abounds in a time like our own, when the didactic impulse chases after wisdom in every possible direction. “We have to find in the interminable nonresolution of [love’s] problems,” he writes, “the charm of a possible solution.” We should be so lucky!
Paradox piles on paradox, but soon Mr. Bruckner gets down to realities. Adultery is a symptom, he says, of an individualist society torn between the ideal of fidelity and a thirst for freedom. But not everything fits into this tension between desire and restraint. “The vertiginous increase of divorce rates in Europe,” he tells us, “is not the result, as is often said, of our selfishness, but rather of our idealism: the impossibility of living together combined with the difficulty of remaining alone.”
In short, our sense of the “impossibility of living together” is directly related to the freedom we pursue so heedlessly—at the expense, too often, of happiness (“the difficulty of remaining alone”). Mr. Bruckner points to “a new conformism that waves the flag of transgression in order to sing the praises of the status quo.” In the end, he wants to synthesize the stability of the past with some of the liberations of our own time, and he ends with wise if familiar words: “Don’t allow yourself to be intimidated! There is more than one road to joy.”
The sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann in “The Curious History of Love” has, by contrast, a plot to explain our travails. What we call “love,” he says, comes to us in the contrasting forms of “agape” (or universal) love, which derives from Christianity, and passion, which emerges from medieval cults and various versions of chivalry. Passion, being focused on a single object, does not consort happily with agape. The reason of the Greek philosophers in some degree could make these two drives lie down together, but the modern world has been dominated by economics, alias capitalism.
Mr. Kaufman thinks that it is self-interest that makes capitalism tick, but he identifies self-interest with the vice of greed. Putting bad things down to human greed is, of course, the fashion of the moment. Modern Western societies no doubt have their share of this particular vice, but greed is certainly not lacking in other cultures. Mr. Kaufman’s view—that a society based on love is at war with the calculating individualism of modern reason—is distinctly theoretical. Take away greed, and we would all love one another? Unlikely!
Mr. Kaufmann wants to replace individualism—and greed and other bad things—with a proper community, and he speaks of “love’s revolution” as if this abstraction might take over the role of the proletariat in Marxism. As he sees it, love is defeated by the calculating habits of market economics—but “it also lives to fight another day.” The way we respond to our emotions, he believes, has major repercussions for society at large. The conclusion Mr. Kaufmann draws is that “knowing how to surrender to our emotions is political.” Everything personal, these days, is political. The habit of seeing politics under every bush, one might rather say, constitutes the predicament from which we suffer.
Neither Mr. Bruckner nor Mr. Kaufmann tangles with the problem of feminism, but feminism is central to the state of love today because it rejects the complementary character of men and women—an idea that is central to our cultural tradition. As different as we are, we need one another, and any theory that does not understand that pattern will be destructive.
When the 1960s idea of liberation needed content, the only thing the unimaginative feminists of those days could think to do with their new free time and expensive education was to plunge into the labor force. Mr. Kaufmann is certainly right to believe that there is no room for chivalry in an economy. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why feminists hate chivalry. It doesn’t fit in with women as labor units.
Feminism, as it is too often defined, makes women essentially economic agents, and children and family life are marginalized in ways that may suit some female graduates but certainly not lots of other women. The whole outlook presumes an end to complementarity—the destruction of the feminine. An ever-increasing scaffolding of politically correct regulation, bureaucracy and law has been needed to sustain the illusion that men and women are indistinguishable agents.
In the chivalric practices of our history, women depended for protection upon the concern of men who respected them as women. The feminist project was to equip women with rights and transfer the job of protection to the state. The results have been mixed, to say the least. To take but one vexed area of social custom and legal practice: Laws about sexual harassment impose penalties on luckless employers who fail to protect female employees from their co-workers. But the presumption that women are so weak as to need protecting from rude male behavior was something that feminism, with its emphasis on empowerment and equal status, seemed eager to attack. It is all marvelously absurd. The zones of love and desire are now invaded by statutes and committees of inquisition.
Mr. Bruckner’s central paradox is that of persecution in the name of love, but that has been an attribute of “loving” relations from time immemorial. He cites, in evidence, both Christianity and communism, in the name of which harm has come to those who were to be loved or saved. He appears to believe that communism is nothing more than a Christian heresy that “allows us to see magnified Christianity’s defects.” Marxism, it seems, “imagined a future society as the terrestrial fulfillment of the promises made by the Gospels.” This claim makes Marx and Jesus prophets in the same line of business, but you do not have to be a Christian to see that Marx is way out of his league here. It is clear that Mr. Bruckner is better at paradoxes than at affinities.
Can love lead to persecution? As a passion, it can lead to anything at all, including death, but the point about both Christianity and the Soviet state is that they were institutions, and institutions have drives of their own. Marriage is an institution, too, and the point of institutions is to discipline us. Love, by contrast, is a spontaneity, always rather intermittent. Neither can be a substitute for the other.
Both Mr. Bruckner and Mr. Kaufmann deplore love as a market. The consumer’s greed in this new condition of love is to accumulate not only material objects but people as well. Men and women sink to the level of mere commodities, giving and receiving satisfactions of an ever-fluctuating kind. Mr. Bruckner thinks that the state of commodified love is worse in America: “Whereas in the United States the co-existence of the sexes always seems on the verge of exploding, Europe is better protected against this plague by the age-old culture of gallantry.”
And that claim perhaps suggests the ultimate mistake of our time: Manners have been erased by doctrine. Individualists—men and women alike—may pursue any enterprise that fits their desires and their talents, but doctrine traps some people into the masquerade of trying to be what they are not. It drains reality from them. Those who live by doctrine rather than passion are diminished by it.
Mr. Minogue is the author, most recently, of “The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life.”
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