Some random thoughts on the passing scene.

One of the most infamous events in the rise of fascism in the previous century was Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.  A bunch of German brownshirts went around in a planned riot, smashing the windows of their target minority group.  No doubt they said it was a righteous protest.

When somebody tells you "I am totally anti-fascist," while acting just like a fascist (for example, smashing windows and setting fires in an oppressed minority neighborhood), they are not just telling you a breathtaking, bald-faced insolent lie.  They are gaslighting you.  They are trying to make you lose hold of reality.  When they do this, you ought to ignore everything they say, and concentrate solely on what they do.  By their fruits you will know them.

When people start smashing windows and setting fires, you do not have a peaceful or even non-violent protest.  You have a riot.  When the window-smashing and fire-setting starts, it is time for all people of good will, who care at all about the community they are in, to leave and go home.  Leave the murderous, thuggish criminals out in the open, with no crowds to hide in, like a cockroach on a plate.  Let the cops round them up.  If they are smashing windows and setting fires, that proves that they hate you and everyone in your community.  They are your enemies.  Give them no aid and no comfort.  Let the cops have them.  Better yet, help the cops get them.

If President Trump is our first Jim Crow president, as Rebecca Hamilton says, he is doing a really bad job at it.  After all, the point of Jim Crow is to keep Blacks poor, disenfranchised, separated, and downtrodden. 

When an administration provides historically black universities and colleges with record funding (and at record durations), and oversees the lowest unemployment rates for blacks in decades, and sees blacks open 400% more small businesses in its first year than they had owned in the year prior, none of that helps keep blacks poor, ignorant, separated, disenfranchised, and downtrodden.  If that's a try at Jim Crow, it's a yuuuuuge fail.

A New World Record

Nobody, but NOBODY, does more murdering than abortionists. Not the Commies, not the Nazis, not the Turks, not the War Between the States, not even influenza.

None of those has passed the 1 Billion (1,000,000,000) Mark. Abortion has.

Is it any wonder that Mother Teresa made so much effort to constantly remind people, "[T]he greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion."

For your stack of quotes:

"Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion." -- Mother Teresa

"It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish." -- Mother Teresa

Pius XII and the Jews

I left the religious and political debate community mentioned in the Obligatory Journey Post over a debate on infallibility. That debate was what first led me to formulate the argument used in my post here, Regarding Doctrine.

After I made that argument, the debate quickly degenerated into an endless series of ad hominem attacks against every member of the Catholic clergy and religious to make the news for their grave and egregious sins. I am very sorry that I wasn't wise enough to point out that these were in fact ad hominem attacks, that the sinfulness of the clergy has nothing to do with whether the Church's doctrines are correct, and that the burden of proof was on the other person to demonstrate that the evil those people did was in fact supported by Catholic Doctrine, rather than letting stand my opponent's contention that their vows of obedience to the Church were prima facie evidence that everything they did was supported by Church doctrine. Instead, to my lasting regret, I made the mistake of trying to defend the indefensible. This mistake made the debate so horrible for me that I left the community over it.

Perhaps part of the reason I found myself on this path is that one of the first victims of these attacks was Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. The attack against him was the libel first accepted because of Rolf Hochhuth's defamatory play, The Deputy: that Pope Pius XII had been deliberately silent regarding the Shoah, because he was an anti-Semite.

I was able to refute this argument quite easily, even then. Between Rabbi David G. Dalin, Professor Ronald J. Rychlak, and Sir Martin Gilbert, there was plenty of material from non-Catholic sources. From learning about Pope Pius XII's actions during WWII, and from reading his encyclicals regarding the Third Reich (particularly Mit Brennender Sorge, which he wrote for his predecessor), I came to love him greatly. It gives me heartache that the lies against him are so much more widely believed than the truth.

One of the most telling arguments I had was a pair of maps.

This one shows where the NSDAP got their votes in 1932:



This one shows where the 1934 census found Catholics:



Still, it would have been very nice, back then, to have had this article on Catholic Exchange, which cites and quotes much of the historical evidence (and here I mean testimony of his contemporaries) that Pope Pius XII was one of the best friends that Jews had, during the Shoah. My love for the Jew-loving Pope (as he was called by his NSDAP enemies) drives me to post these links.

China: Stronghold of the Culture of Death

This article, posted on Catholic exchange, got me thinking about China today. The conclusion I reached was this:

Mao Zedong was the most evil man of the 20th century, and perhaps of all time thus far. He doesn't get the press that Hitler and Stalin did, in part because he looks so inoffensive -- like a poet, say. And part is because the People's Republic of China is nowhere near so careful to keep records as the NSDAP, or even the Soviet Union. And part is because the PRC remains essentially closed, with the Communist Party controlling almost everything that is known about what happens, and has happened, there. But regardless, Mao Zedong is responsible for more death and inhumanity than anyone else you can name.

Mao Zedong is responsible for the deaths from the Revolution, from the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. It's estimated that the Communist Party of China is responsible for one hundred million deaths.

One hundred million. That's 100,000,000. That's between seven and eight times as many as the NSDAP (granted, Hitler only had about 12 years, compared to 50 for the PRC). And I'm not counting all the forced abortions and other deaths resulting from the One Child Policy and its enforcement. The One Child Policy is easily the most evil and inhuman of all of the excuses for mass murder and democide that China has ever instituted. And because of it, China is the first civilization to accept infanticide and child abandonment since Pagan Rome.

And now the chickens are starting to come home to roost. Each child, as it enters into the workforce, will have two parents and four grandparents to care for. China has declared war on children in order to prevent them from being a drain on productivity. The time will come, and shortly, when the People's Republic decides that the old are also a drain on productivity and wealth. And when it does happen, you can be sure that a policy of geriatricide will follow.

Given the utilitarian bent of the government, I'm betting the old will be shipped off to concentration camps, forced at gunpoint to do very hard labor on short rations or less, so as to wring from them whatever production is possible. And veneration of the old used to be a pillar of the Chinese culture. Communism is destroying everything that was worthwhile in Chinese culture.

Pray for the Chinese!

Talk Radio

I'm an opinion and analysis junkie. As a result, I listen to talk radio by preference; besides, there's no classical music on the air where I live. I sure do wish there was.

Today, I heard two monumentally STUPID things on the air. The first was uttered by Rush Limbaugh. After the bottom of the hour break in the first hour, he asked a question he clearly thought was rhetorical: "What's the real downside to staying in Iraq?"

Gee, Rush, if you're an actual fiscal conservative, the words "tax burden" should just LEAP to mind, you know?

The more I listen to Rush, the more apt I find a description I saw put to him some time back: America's Top Republican Ward-Heeler. He's for the Republican Party and their position, whatever it may be. Anything one might have considered a political principle of his, such as cutting spending, gets dumped post haste if it happens to conflict with current Republican political goals. And thus his role is to be sure that all the Republican faithful accept the Republican party line, as though it were infalliable doctrine.

The other was a news item brought up by the local fella who follows Rush. He mentioned that the British National Curriculum is dropping all mention of Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Mohandes Ghandi, and Martin Luther King (Jr., presumably). No mention is made in the stories I found as to whether FDR, Neville Chamberlain, Charles de Gaulle, or Benito Mussolini rate a mention. The World Wars and the Shoah (Holocaust) have to be covered, by law; but how on earth are they going to ensure that students know who did it, when, and why, if the only people in history who MUST be mentioned are Abolitionists William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano?

I will be very much surprised (and disappointed) if Jewish groups and their friends do not rise up in collective apoplectic uproar over the complete and deliberate ignorance of history being foisted upon British school children. Methinks a home schooling movement may be in the offing there....