#i wish it were true that this was exclusively partisan

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

i am so sorry but now is actually the appropriate time for the party in the house, senate, and white house that has claimed to stand for the right to have AND access abortion to wield that power and pass a law codifying roe - and do whatever it takes to do that. when they are not doing that, it calls that commitment into question. and it can demoralize people in an election year. obviously, everyone needs to show up because we are all we got. that means using every tool available, including voting (and it is ridiculous and irresponsible to suggest throwing in the towel is going to help anybody). but to organize a dispossessed people, and women are among the most dispossessed in the world, we have to be clear eyed about their actual material realities and how that affects their perspectives on politics

[arcticdementor]

It is appropriate to begin to understand yourself as a combatant in a war that you may only be dimly aware is being waged. You are in fact operating in the battlespace at this very moment. Consider the implications. Consider that you are marked.

Your self-identification as a combatant, or not, is irrelevant. You have been declared an adversary of the True and Just cause of Democracy. The adversary in this war is a floating signifier anyway, purposefully undefined. Don’t go searching for your name in any database (though you may find it there). The adversary can be anyone, at any time. He is a cipher. The territory under contestation is perhaps even less well-demarcated. As a matter of physical geography, it may be said to not exist at all. And yet we are in it. We are fighting it. The war is on.

…

The proclamations of those declaring this war leave vanishingly little room for uncertainty. Their rhetoric is becoming more explicit every day. No one can deny this. Even the soberest mind must acknowledge their increasing belligerence.

“In the aftermath of the insurrection on January 6th…” This is by now a common refrain. Oliver Stone also said — or maybe it was Homer — that every war must start with an event. No doubt they have been waiting a long time to declare their intentions, but now they have finally found their casus belli. When they say that January 6th is their 9/11, this is what they mean. It may seem that the incoherent, spontaneous nature of what happened at the Capitol might vitiate such lofty comparisons. But for the regime, all the better. The ambiguity allows for the widest possible net to be cast over their enemy, as John Brennan would have it, the “unholy alliance” of “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

Tag yourself. Not that any of these terms matter. Again, they are floating signifiers. They mean everything and nothing. Importantly, they mean you. They mean me.

Brennan of course is not alone. Just days after he delivered his ominous remarks, his CIA colleague Robert Grenier wrote an op-ed for the New York Times declaring the forces responsible for January 6th — again, never clearly defined — to be regarded in the same terms as ISIS and Al-Qaeda. He spoke of an ongoing “domestic insurgency” and the need to put it down with the same degree of force as his own Counterrorism division applied to jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Stanley McChrystal echoed nearly identical sentiments within the week. Javed Ali, whose bio reads less like a human being’s than the formless node of the Foreign Policy blob that he is, writing for the Security State rag the Cipher Brief, in an article indicative of the borg-like mass to which he belongs, suggested the “New Right,” which includes the usual litany of conservative bogeymen all the way up to those with such alarming views as, for example, being “pro-2nd amendment,” warrants the creation of Domestic Terrorism laws that would include a domestic surveillance program mirroring the British Security Service to monitor online speech and circumvent Constitutional protections against prior restraint.

…

But beyond the morality play, and the heady drama of the fate of Western man, it’s Lind’s attention to the form and processes of war that are most relevant here. In the 4th Generation war everything is muddled and inexact. Military and civilian life merge into a fluid, indivisible state of mind and being. Everywhere is a potential target. There is a kind of atemporality to it, too. Individual battles never clearly begin or end. Much of it is fought in the digital ether. Fixed points of planning and operation become obsolete, too easily identified and subverted. There are questions about the status of the war itself, and it is often an advantage of the stronger side to plausibly deny there is any war at all.

In the end, Lind resolves these ambiguities in no uncertain terms. His 4th Generation civil war, however abstract and indistinct, eventually reverts to the classic mode. Its wages are measured in lives lost and territory gained. His heroes shoulder their rifles and vanquish their enemies in pools of their own blood. A Christian nation of local, artisanal economies blooms in a Jeffersonian spirit of revitalization. It’s a chilling read, the Minecraft meme brought to life.

But it is in this latter reversion to classic military confrontation where Lind’s map loses touch with the territory we are actually living in. We are not in a war that accommodates armed conflict, nor should we want it to. Let me repeat that for the minders reading this: violence, kids, is not the answer to our current problems.

Rather, some have speculated that what we are living through now is better described as 5th Generation war. A fifth-generation war is one where the ambiguity stands, even more so, but is never quite so manifestly resolved. (This Twitter thread from last October by anon user Reality Gamer provides a useful summary of the concept.)

This war, if we are to adopt the model, which I believe we should — and for which there is much compelling evidence — is fought almost exclusively over ideas. As in Lind’s concept, everything is indistinct, everything is abstracted right up to the point of nonexistence. War and peace, civilian and combatant, battlefield and neutral territory all collapse in a morass of ever-present meta-conflict. The conceptual boundaries between debate, activism, and terrorism are themselves the site of primary engagement. What matters is not who controls the streets in the wake of a clash of forces, but he who decides that the clashes are “mostly peaceful” and their own soldiers just an “idea.”

That is, it is a war over narrative control. Instead of armed battalions, it’s a loose affiliation of entrenched interests — deep-state operatives, media conglomerates, NGOs, lawfare apparatchiks, academics, the many-sided face of globohomo — controlling information networks to shore up their resources and guard against whoever they identify as a threat. These threats and the methods to neutralize them never have to be explicitly stated or shared across the network. In fact, it is better if they aren’t. It obviates the problem of what Edward Luttwack calls the “paradoxical logic of strategy.” Instead, the system, like a black box AI, manages its agenda according to its own hidden processes.

And what is this agenda exactly? To enforce the conditions of consent.

…

What we are experiencing now is something quite different, the regime on war-footing, no longer confident enough in its own legitimacy to dare put that legitimacy to test. And as is the case for all regimes in such a weakened, sclerotic state, though the strategies and tactics are more diffuse and perhaps less blunt than in eras past, we are treated to the same predictable response: crush dissent, flatten and homogenize the culture, divide and alienate the population from one another, declare a monopoly not just on knowledge and belief, but on the asking of questions themselves. Vaclav Havel, writing on the withering Communist regime of his native Czechoslovakia, described this final desperate effort to coerce the population into consent as the “nihilization of life.” 

…

When vast swaths of non-compliant Americans are declared domestic insurgents, it behooves us to conduct ourselves accordingly. This is not to say that whatever might broadly be called the ‘Dissident Right’ ought to assume a defensive crouch, or retreat into passive quietism until the regime exhausts itself. Though we may be in the midst of a 5th Generation war, some of the old rules still apply, and the insurgent, however diminished, however outgunned — metaphorically, of course — has certain advantages he can make use of.

Another war historian, David Gallula, describing the Cold War spasms breaking apart and reforming the global map after World War II, wrote in 1965 what has become the textbook on the nature of insurgencies. Gallula was a man of his time, and most of his examples are superficially outdated, Communist rebels from Greece to North Africa to Southeast Asia asserting themselves with greater and lesser effectiveness throughout the Third World. We are not Communists, and this is not the Cold War, no matter how much our State Department might wish it were so. Nonetheless, Gallula provides a few key insights that broadly apply to our fight, and that we ought to keep in mind as we ask the question of what comes next.

To begin, the site of contestation in the 5th Generation war against our decrepit regime is not firstly the halls of power, certainly not the Capitol building, and not even really the formal political arena at all. Borrowing from Yarvin, I’d echo that Republican electoral victories are not sufficient for breaking the regime until the Republican candidate sees himself as an outsider prepared to tell the regime that it must submit. Still, contra Yarvin, winning political fights is good, where we can get them, and there are ways of engaging in local politics, especially, that may achieve certain desired effects. But ultimately, political victories are downstream of a more fundamental fight, which is winning the support of what Gullala coarsely calls “the population.”

…

That is, the normie must be given a cause. This cause must exist outside the political paradigm within which he has been accustomed to understanding these conflicts. Scott Alexander is not entirely wrong to propose that Republicans wage a “class conflict” against the strata of elite sense-makers who despise them. It is indeed a righteous cause, and an effective message. He is wrong however that Republicans, as such, ought to do this. No. This is not a partisan conflict against Democrats, though there is much overlap. This is a conflict of insurgents against a failing regime. That is the way it must be framed and its campaigns prosecuted.

I am cautiously optimistic that Americans understand this cause and the nature of their enemy instinctively. There is no denying the rot at the heart of American life, of Western life. There is no denying the ever-presence of the bugman and his sickly designs for us. The energy leaking out against this is everywhere in sight. However misdirected, however frenetic and decoupled from meaningful objectives, a spirit of disobedience obtains. They feel the quickening incursion of the public life into the private, no doubt accelerated by Zoom World and the bright eye of our screens watching and recording our every thought. Americans can feel caught in a straightjacket of preference falsification and coercive moral decrees, the stiltifying HRization of their inner universe. What a bleak and limited existence!

…

Finally, as Gullala observes, an insurgent movement in its infancy is necessarily small. It is necessarily weak. It needs time to build. It cannot on day one confront the regime on its turf and presume to use the regime’s own weapons against it. Again, this is not to advocate for quietism, but rather to recognize the limited usefulness of operating within the domains of social and political activity the regime already controls. You are not going to take back the universities or Hollywood or the news desk. Infiltrate these places and expose them for what they are, but to destroy them rather than to save them.

Before anything else, we must build a culture of our own. Any meaningful insurgency will be downstream from its capacity to imagine. Direct action politics will flail and follow, rather than lead, if it is not tethered to the kind of self-understanding that can only be achieved through art. The regime understands this, if only intuitively, and the ban waves and censorship are an attempt to tear apart the communities where this art can be cultivated and shared. But they are not yet omnipresent. They have not yet, as in Havel’s Czechoslovakia, managed to altogether “nihilize life.” There are cracks still to penetrate. There is, deep in the American soul, a resilience that is not yet extinguished. Build the communities, forge the relationships, online and off, where this resilience can manifest and triumph over the enemy and its machines.

[spilledreality]

Generalized compatibilism

When we speak to the “complexity” of phenomena, we perhaps give some token nod to “emergence,” or the relation between parts. But we do not so often discuss the real causes and implications of our operating inside high-entropy systems which refuse simplistic explanation. 

These systems are multivariate and indeed almost infinitely variate, with a kind of “approaching limit” of null effect from the least influential factors. They are not just situated in a complex world (there is no such thing as “autonomy”); they are also constantly in flux and ambiguously bounded. 

It seems obviously a mistake then to appeal to reductionism—reductionism not in the naturalist, material sense, but in the causal and dynamic sense of a system in progress. Very very few systems we care about can be explained by one to two variables while also providing majority coverage of the phenomena. And yet this reductionism is constantly what we see; it may not be explicitly stated, but it is evidenced in the implicit non-compatibilism of the scholarly outlook, an outlook no doubt motivated in large part by the natural incentives of the Bourdieusian field: scarcities of recognition, scarcities of attention, scarcities of funding.

Similarly, in the public domain, we see an absolutism which refuses to cede any legitimacy to the positions of the other side: the moral standing of the fetus as human being must be flatly denied rather than simply subordinated to the rights of the bearing woman. Acknowledgment is avoided because it would oblige not just integration of the perspective but legitimation of the “other side,” in other words, requiring both bounding (compromise) and a ceding of right-to-speak—neither of which is an acceptable outcome for an interested partisan.

In other words, we not only wish to distinguish ourselves in the sense of achievement; we wish for exclusivity, because exclusivity is distinction. The achievement is merely what sets apart, or excludes. It is the vehicle, not the destination.

And yet a generalized compatibilism appears to be the best way we know to apprehend or process complexity—through recourse to phenomenons’ multidimensionality. We see this in our contemporary treatment of literary “interpretations.” Each reveals another dimension implicit in the work, and while any one interpretive dimension can be challenged, there is never an expectation of mutual exclusivity. 

Georgia Warnke, 1999, Legitimate Differences:

We assume that these new dimensions of the work can appear because different interpreters approach it with different experiences and concerns, view it from within different contexts, and come at it from the vantage point of different interpretive traditions. We assume that we can learn from these interpretations and, indeed, that we can learn in a distinctive sense: not in the sense that we approach the one true or real meaning of the text or work of art but rather in the sense simply that we come to understand new dimensions of its meaning and thus to understand it in an expanded way.

I emphasize “contemporary treatment” because this attitude is not natural. It is the product of a century of discourse in literary theory, much of which began with warring over the “correct” interpretation of a text, then moved on to warring over the “proper” interpretive frame/s, and has finally settled on a pluralistic indeterminacy. In other words, it is anticompatibilism and exclusivity of explanation which apparently constitute our natural positions on matters. (And here I wish I could strikethrough the term natural in the way of Derrida, to show the necessity and hopeless misfit of the word).

Of much relevance here is Ken Liberman’s observations of coffee-tasting, which builds off the work of Merleau-Ponty on “chiasmic intertwining.”

When you drink the coffee, descriptors give you access to dimensions of the flavor and you can communicate those dimensions to other tasters... [you can] direct someone to find what can possibly be located with the use of that descriptor... [it] is opening up the taste of the coffee but at the same time it's closing it down, because once you categorize this basket of fruit... then how do you taste, you know, vanilla that's going on at the same time... Nobody's even attuning to it. You might not even sense it.

Our descriptions both unveil and veil simultaneously. In obscuring, we illuminate. To Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and many others, this is a central paradox of phenomenology.

Generalized compatibilism is a view of verbal, moral, and theoretical disputes alike. (See “Linguistic Conquests” for an explanation as to the reductionism of narrow-and-conquer methods in philosophy, which is mirrored in literary theory’s disputes over proper factoring of the handle “meaning.”) I take it as an extension of what is now typically perceived as the most sophisticated understanding of the free will and determinism debate, known as compatibilism. I believe that the characteristics of that philosophical debate are shared by many ongoing debates across the humanities and inexact sciences: an appearance of irreconcilable difference which, when reconciled, present us with greater clarity than either position on its own.

There are deep motivations to refusing to acknowledge an oppositional interpretation. But the most incisive—if not recognized—thinkers historically are those who manage to integrate their opposition into their own frame, who “yes and” or qualify, who can to “maintain coverage” or “preserve ground” rather than reduce multidimensional reality into one-dimensional explanations.

John Shook on John Dewey’s fin-de-siècle philosophical practice:

There were Hegelian rationalisms flourishing, other kinds of idealisms, various kinds of radical naive empiricisms, all kinds of anti-Darwinian alternatives. And Dewey [...] incorporated what they were trying to say into a naturalistic framework so thoroughly that nowadays the field looks very cleaned up from our perspective.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Rather suddenly, we are on a trajectory toward the potential impeachment of President Trump.

Both close allies of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and vulnerable Democrats in swing districts have signaled their desire this week to pursue impeachment proceedings over President Trump’s alleged efforts to induce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating Joe Biden, whose son Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukranian gas producer during Biden’s tenure as vice president. A majority of House Democrats had already expressed a desire to impeach Trump over his conduct toward Russia in the 2016 campaign and his handling of the Russia investigation, but the list of pro-impeachment Democrats then included relatively few from competitive districts, and Pelosi had largely held the reins against impeachment.

This time is different. Although the story is still unfolding as I write this, impeachment is, at a minimum, highly plausible. And if Pelosi wants impeachment — as she reportedly does — she can probably get it. Democrats have a fairly comfortable majority in the House and they have been relatively unified under Pelosi. Betting markets, which had been bearish on impeachment, now assign around a 50 percent chance that Trump will be impeached (but not necessarily removed from office) during his first term.

But Democrats had better hope that something else is different this time too: public opinion. Despite Trump being quite unpopular, and despite the public largely buying Democrats’ interpretation of the fact pattern on Russia — most polls find that a majority of the public thinks that Trump sought to obstruct the investigation into Russia, for instance — impeachment was a soundly unpopular proposition.

In the table below, I’ve compiled data on all polls from PollingReport.com, a compendium of high-quality telephone surveys, on whether the public thinks Trump should be impeached or at least that Congress should begin impeachment proceedings.1 And despite the slightly different question wordings — you could favor holding hearings on impeaching Trump but not actually favor his impeachment per se2 — these polls have tended to produce similar results: Impeachment was an unpopular option through the entirely of the Russia investigation process.

On average, in all polls since the start of 2017, 38.5 percent of the public favored impeachment and 55.7 percent opposed it, which is fairly close to a mirror image of Trump’s approval and disapproval ratings. And there had been absolutely no sign that the public was moving toward impeachment. If anything, the opposite was true and impeachment had become slightly less popular. Polls conducted after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to the public on April 183 showed an average of 37.3 percent of the public favoring impeachment, and 57.3 percent opposed. The two polls in the database conducted since Mueller’s testimony to Congress on July 24 showed even worse numbers: 33.5 percent in favor of impeachment and 59.5 percent against.

This article is meant to be forward-looking, rather than a comprehensive analysis of all facets of public opinion related to the Russia investigation. But numbers like these ought to at least give Democrats pause. Heretofore, quite a lot of voters have both disapproved of Trump’s conduct and disapproved of impeaching him.

Why this gap has persisted isn’t entirely clear. Pelosi’s reluctance on impeachment undoubtedly dissuaded some Democratic voters from getting on board; the most recent Quinnipiac poll found only 61 percent of Democrats in favor of impeachment and 29 percent opposed. Those numbers may increase now that House leadership is coming around to impeachment.

The same poll, however, found independent voters mostly against impeachment — 62 percent opposed it to 28 percent in favor. That’s despite Trump having only a 35 percent approval rating among independents in the poll. So impeachment has given Democrats problems among swing voters as well.

Another explanation may simply be that the public has a high threshold for impeachment, especially for an elected president and especially especially when that president will be on the ballot again soon. By contrast, Andrew Johnson was an unelected president when he was impeached — he had taken over the presidency after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton took place in their second terms. Voters may not think Russia met that threshold; in fact, the Russia investigation itself was the lowest priority for midterm election voters among 12 issues that Gallup asked about last year.

One explanation that doesn’t make any sense — but which seems to come up from pro-impeachment partisans every time I’ve pointed out impeachment’s lack of popularity — is the notion that the Democrats simply weren’t focused enough on the Russia investigation or that the public didn’t know enough about it. In fact, the Russia investigation has been one of the most focused-upon news stories of our lifetime; it was the most-covered story of 2017 on the network news and the second most-covered of 2018 after Brett Kavanagh’s confirmation hearings. And the public has not moved toward impeachment as more and more facts have been revealed about Russia, including Mueller’s exhaustive report. This is despite the fact that, as I mentioned — feel free to browse the polling results yourself — the public mostly agrees with the Democrats’ interpretation of Muller’s findings; they do not think the report cleared Trump of wrongdoing, for instance.

Other Democrats like to cite the fact that impeachment against Nixon was initially fairly unpopular. But this comparison doesn’t entirely work either. Rather dramatic facts were being revealed throughout the Watergate investigation and impeachment process, which tended to sway public opinion. By contrast, the outlines of Mueller’s eventual findings were largely laid out for the public a long time ago, through Mueller’s various indictments and through reporting at places such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. Whereas for the past year or so at least, Democrats have had relatively little new material to work with on Russia. The increasing numbers of House Democrats who called for impeachment over the past few months didn’t seem to move public sentiment in Democrats’ favor either.

Again, none of this is meant to provide for an absolutely definitive analysis of how public opinion might have evolved if Democrats had proceeded on impeachment as a result of the Russia investigation. The sample size of impeachments is small, which make any conclusions tentative. But that uncertainty doesn’t necessarily work to Democrats’ benefit, given that the status quo is fairly promising for them electorally: Trump is quite unpopular and, although these polls don’t mean much at this stage, he currently trails all his major Democratic rivals (especially Biden, but also Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) in head-to-head matchups. Democrats are also coming off a strong midterm.

The politics of impeachment on Ukraine may be different than on Russia. But Democrats should take public opinion seriously. That doesn’t mean you always have to do the poll-driven thing. But don’t wish the numbers away because you don’t like them, or presume that they’ll change in your favor, or assume there won’t be consequences for taking an unpopular action.

More specifically for Democrats, their failure to persuade the public that Russia warranted impeachment offers several potential lessons if they are to proceed on Ukraine:

Lesson No. 1: Be narrow and specific, perhaps with a near-exclusive focus on Ukraine. For some Democrats in Congress who were nearly ready to impeach Trump over Russia, Ukraine may have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. But Democrats probably shouldn’t portray it to the public that way.

The public was largely not persuaded about the wisdom of impeaching Trump on Russia. And Ukraine provides a much clearer story, in some ways: Trump allegedly pressured a foreign leader to undermine one of his chief rivals in the 2020 election. It’s not a case of the cover-up being worse than the crime, or of Trump attempting to obstruct the investigation, or of actions that took place before Trump took office. It’s a direct, recent and relatively simple throughline. The more focused Democrats are on Ukraine specifically, the better chance that public opinion will turn out better for them than it did on Russia.

Even worse for Democrats than combining Ukraine and Russia would be to offer a laundry list of impeachment charges, involving the emoluments clause or Trump’s general conduct in office or what not. The public has a high threshold for what constitutes impeachable conduct, so reasons that are below that threshold might weaken the overall case for impeachment rather than being additive.

Furthermore, such a strategy would tend to play into the White House’s strengths. The White House is fairly skilled at muddying the news cycle and navigating its way through the swampy thicket of a story in ways that can fatigue the public. It isn’t a perfect analogy, but in the Kavanaugh hearings, the sheer volume of accusations against Kavanaugh eventually helped him; the less credible allegations allowed Kavanaugh and the White House to cast doubt on the more credible ones, such as Christine Blasey Ford’s. Throwing more accusations or alleged reasons for impeachment at Trump could likewise allow the White House to focus on the weakest ones.

Interestingly enough, the Washington Post op-ed by seven first-term Democrats calling for impeachment solely referred to Ukraine as a potential cause for impeachment. So Democratic leadership may agree with this strategy.

Lesson No. 2: Don’t overpromise on details unless you can deliver. You’ll sometimes hear the sentiment that the entire Mueller Report might have been more politically damaging to Trump if it had dropped all at once instead of slowly being teased out through indictments and news accounts and investigative reports over the course of two years. That seems reasonable enough, although there’s no way to test the hypothetical. It’s also true, though, that the public’s reaction to news events — and the media’s reaction to news events, which conditions the public’s response — is often calibrated relative to “expectations.” If the expectations get too far ahead of themselves, even a relatively damaging story may land with a thud.

Without relitigating the Mueller Report more than we have to, it’s safe to say that it provided neither the total exoneration that the president claimed, nor the direct evidence of collusion with Russia that Democrats might have been hoping for. That’s to say nothing of the breathless speculation about what the Mueller Report would say on cable news, or the too-frequent reporting missteps on important Russia-related stories (even if, in my view anyway, the press largely got the big picture right on Russia).

The fact that Ukraine is a much simpler story than Russia again works to Democrats’ benefit here: There are fewer details to screw up. But if Democrats promise caught-red-handed evidence above and beyond what’s been made public already (the White House has not exactly been steadfast in its denials) and doesn’t deliver on it, it’s obviously going to injure their case. And it should go without saying that the more damaging the information, the harder it could be for Democrats to obtain. That Trump has pledged to release a “fully declassified and unredacted transcript” of his phone conversation with Zelensky might make Democrats a little nervous since Trump presumably wouldn’t release it so soon if it contained many bombshells.

Lesson No. 3: Emphasize the threats to election integrity. As I mentioned, I suspect (though I certainly can’t prove) that some of the public’s reluctance on impeachment over Russia stemmed from the fact that Trump was still in his first term and is running for re-election. We want to decide this one for ourselves, the public may have been saying.

In some ways, that’s a bigger problem for Democrats on Ukraine, since the election is even closer now. But, of course, the Ukraine scandal involves the 2020 election: Trump’s efforts to impair Biden’s candidacy. My point is simply that Democrats should emphasize that angle since any impeachment hearings would take place directly against the backdrop of the election, a prospect that voters might otherwise find strange.

Lesson No. 4: Stay unified. As I said above, I don’t think Democratic infighting over impeachment on Russia explains all, or necessarily most, of its unpopularity with the general public. But it probably explains some of it. This tends to be one of Pelosi’s strengths, but the more Democrats are willing to sink or swim together on Ukraine impeachment, the more compelling their message is liable to be to the general public.

Lesson No. 5: Work quickly and urgently. Now that they’ve seemingly decided to move forward on Ukraine, there are lots of reasons for Democrats to move fast. It will reduce the potential for public fatigue over the story, which can set in quickly for all news stories in the Trump era. And a sense of urgency could underscore some of the other themes here, e.g. that there’s an immediate threat to the integrity of the 2020 election, to national security, or both.

Obviously, Democrats will need to weigh moving rapidly against Lesson No. 2 (the risk of getting too far ahead of themselves). Nobody said impeachment would be easy for anyone involved!

But the other benefit to moving fast is that, if impeachment backfires on Democrats and makes Trump more popular, Democrats will have more time to recover from that. Impeachment isn’t necessarily an all-in bet for Democrats, but it’s an awfully big one.

[thetruthiest-blog]

Are the Media Lying? How to Tell.

Free media provide crucial checks and balances to the government, but what if you don’t think you can trust them?

Last night I came across this survey, run by the Trump campaign team. Ostensibly, its purpose is to survey the public on their opinion of the mainstream media’s reporting. The questions are so obviously biased, though, that it’s hard to take it seriously. For example, it asks “Do you believe that the mainstream media does not do their due diligence fact-checking before publishing stories on the Trump administration?” and “Do you believe that the media unfairly reported on President Trump’s executive order temporarily restricting people entering our country from nations compromised by radical Islamic terrorism?”

These questions appear to be an attempt to garner support for the executive branch to restrict the media. This should have us all quaking in our boots, guys. Discrediting the media and promoting obviously biased sources can only hurt us.

We’re living in an unprecedented time here in the good ol’ USA. That’s for a lot of reasons, but one big one is that the public’s distrust of the media is incredibly high. According to the latest Gallup poll, only 32% of Americans say they have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of trust in the media, which is the lowest number in Gallup polling history. It’s worth noting that this poll is from late 2016, before the election. I’d bet my 401k that when the new poll numbers come out they’ll be lower.

There are several things influencing this - first, the president and his team consistently call the integrity of the media into question, and they aren’t subtle about it. If I took a shot every time he or someone on his staff said the media are reporting fake news, I’d be drunk all the time.

Second, there are a lot of outlets calling themselves news sources. In general, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s better to have multiple news outlets rather than one or two. This keeps the media from becoming a state-run entity a la North Korea or Airstrip One. The flip side to this is that anyone can call themselves a news source, regardless of whether or not they are credible. When you’re overwhelmed by so many disparate sources throwing information at you, it’s tempting to just let someone else interpret the news for you. Try, try not to go this route. There are good ways to objectively evaluate the news so that you decide what’s right or wrong.  

I have a journalism degree. This will probably either raise or lower your opinion of me right off the bat. When I see attacks on the media, I cringe. I mean, that’s my tribe. But I admit that some media sources suck. Here are things to consider when deciding whether or not to trust the news.

1. Decide whether or not you’re willing to believe something you wish wasn’t true.

Before I get going here, I want to acknowledge that most people are going to believe what they want to believe. If your immediate response to reading an article is “well, I just don’t believe that and nothing can convince me otherwise” then I can’t help you. If you’re not willing to change your mind about things, then move along and continue reading whatever news source reports the news you already think is true.

2. Are you reading an editorial or a hard news story?

Editorials (op-eds) are meant to display the author’s opinion. Their entire purpose is to explain why the author leans a certain way on an issue. Do not get your news strictly from editorials. You know you’re reading one if it’s written in first person (”I believe X”; “we need to Y,” etc.) or if it’s in the opinion or op-ed section of the paper/website. What if you can’t tell if it’s an op-ed or hard news? That right there is a red flag.

3. Does the news outlet use blatantly biased language?

Hard news should be stated bluntly, without language written to push the reader into one bias or another. It’s: “J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books,” not “J.K. Rowling, the most talented Scot ever, is the author of the fabulously fabulous Harry Potter books.” The second version is fine in an op-ed, but not in a hard news story.

InfoWars, one of the most biased news sites on the tubes, is currently running an article with this subhead: “As we all know, our violent, domestic abusing, transsexual, six-time deportee illegal aliens are our greatest strength”.

That is some prime bullshit right there. InfoWars knows their audience, the far right. That subhead is not written to inform; it’s written to confirm the reader’s existing bias. Valid news sources do not do this. They do not report hard news using sarcasm and leading language.

Before you write me off as another liberal hating on the right, I’ll give you an example from AlterNet, a blatantly left-wing site. A current headline reads “A Dangerous Troll is Now Reporting from the White House’. To top it off, the main story image is a picture of actual trolls. I mean, not literally actual trolls because trolls aren’t real, but guys...it’s a picture of trolls leading a story not about the movie. Red flag. 

4. Is the news coming from an outlet that reports obviously discredited news?

I’mma pick on InfoWars one more time because they’re such a great example of a terribly biased news source. Alex Jones, its creator and editor-in-chief, thinks that the Sandy Hook shootings were a government-run false-flag attack. Guys. Use your brains here. What does common sense tell you? My friend’s nephew died there. My brain tells me there was a psychotic killer who killed him and many others. Not everything is a conspiracy.

5. Does the person reporting the news try to convince you that everyone who disagrees with them is wrong?

People who do this think you are dumb. They don’t think you will fact-check them. Prove them wrong and fact-check the shit out of anything this person says. If you still agree with them afterwards, so be it, but at least you didn’t let someone else tell you how to think. Politifact is a great source for independent (read: non-partisan) fact-checking.

6. What sources do they cite, and are they all anonymous?

Anonymous sources aren’t necessarily indicative of biased reporting. Generally, if a news source you trust uses anonymous sources sometimes, it shouldn’t discredit everything they’re saying. Look at Deep Throat, for example. But if a news source exclusively cites anonymous sources, or cites sources whose claims can’t be independently verified, consider that a red flag.

Bottom line: the mainstream media is not bent on feeding you lies. They are mainstream for a reason, because they’ve existed long enough to have built up their reputation and credibility. Of course they can still be wrong, and of course you can still sometimes spot bias in their reporting. They’re people, after all, just like the rest of us. Trust yourself and trust your common sense. You’ve got this.

[englishchinesetranslations]

by Revilo P. Oliver

Editor’s Note: Dr. Revilo P. Oliver was a distinguished Classics professor at the University of Illinois for 32 years, was a founder of both the John Birch Society and National Review magazine, and was a leading partisan of our race in the latter half of the 20th century. This review of Lawrence Brown’s Might of the West is one of Oliver’s best essays. Originally published in Instaurationmagazine in slightly edited form, it appears here for the first time as originally written by Dr. Oliver, based on a new transcription of Dr. Oliver’s typescript. — Kevin Alfred Strom.

LAWRENCE R. BROWN’s The Might of the West is one of the fundamental books of our century. It was published by Obolensky in 1963, just at the time at which that publishing house passed into the hands of new owners, who virtually suppressed the book. It has only now become generally available, thanks to the enlightened generosity of a young architectural designer in Wisconsin, who provided the money for a photo-offset reproduction of the original printing, necessarily but unfortunately including its rare typographical errors, a few deplorable misstatements, and a conjectural number of passages that the author would doubtless have wished to revise, since it is most unlikely that a vigorous mind would have learned nothing from study and meditation in seventeen years. These, however, are but minor blemishes in a great work, and we should be grateful for what has been given us.

Inquiry into the causes of the rise and fall of nations and civilizations is at least as old as Herodotus, but study of the problem in the form in which it presents itself so acutely and so urgently to us may be said to begin with Théodore Funck-Brentano’s La Civilisation et ses lois (1876), which was followed by such notable works as Brooks Adams’ The Law of Civilization and Decay (1896) and Correa Moylan Walsh’s The Climax of Civilisation (1917). All earlier works, however, were so eclipsed by Oswald Spengler’s magisterial and celebrated Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22) that all subsequent writing on the subject must be defined by reference to Spengler, although the course of history since 1922 has shown that he failed to take into account some forces that have powerfully distorted the development of our civilization, if not of others.

Although Mr. Brown’s purpose is to illuminate the true nature and vital force of our culture rather than to formulate general laws of historical change, he follows Spengler in regarding our Western civilization as unique and discrete, having no organic relation to any other civilization: it began around 900 and has brought us to our catastrophic present. He has dropped, however, Spengler’s conception of a civilization as a quasi-biological organism with a fixed life-span, whence it follows that the West is now senile and, like an old man, has no future but the ineluctable decay of vitality that precedes an unescapable death. In this respect, therefore, Mr. Brown’s philosophy, as he formulated it in 1963, is basically optimistic: Far from being doomed by some inherent or external destiny, we of the West, if only we come to our senses and understand who we really are, may be just beginning the great age of our civilization.

Like Spengler, Mr. Brown identifies the Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, and Chinese civilizations as discrete from our own. He concisely surveys their political development and their accomplishments in mechanics, architecture, and the arts, with the notable exception of literature, for which he evidently feels indifference, if not disdain. He also recognizes Spengler’s “Magian” culture but uses the term ‘Levantine’ to designate it, devoting special attention to its dominant superstitions and the mentality that produced them. These other cultures, and even the Classical, are described for purposes of contrast, for Mr. Brown, who doubts the possibility of establishing an historical causality, writes to enable us “to discover our lost identity.”

He makes a strong case — stronger, I should say, than Spengler’s — for the independence of European civilization, and he is eminently right in making the principal criterion the great technology and the scientific method that are the true glory and the unique creation of our culture.

Our civilization, on his showing, was born in the time of Charlemagne, and it went through the process that Spengler calls pseudo-morphosis, by which a young people, emerging from barbarism, takes over some of the outward forms and the learning of a more advanced civilization. We took over very little from the Classical and much from the Levantine world, which was represented by both Byzantium and Islam. But we failed — at the time and ever since — to eliminate the alien elements after they had served their purpose, and that is why it has been the West’s dolorous fate to be “a society whose inward convictions have been at hopeless variance with its outward professions.”

Mr. Brown proves that the characteristic tendency of our dominant mentality appears in Anselm; he rightly emphasizes the great intellectual activity of the Scholastics; and his disquisition on the emergence of real scientific inquiry among them will astonish, I dare say, all but the very few of our contemporaries who take the trouble to read the most uninviting of all the uninviting texts in Mediaeval Latin.

European civilization was developing the great power for which its unique mentality destined it, and it was gradually expelling the alien elements it had absorbed at its origin, when its progress was checked by a disastrous recrudescence of those alien elements, which thus came to dominate and pervert it for centuries. The two fatal poisons were Christianity and Humanism, which Mr. Brown regards as concurrent and complementary infections of the mass mind, and not as essentially antithetical forces. He accordingly sees “the Renaissance and the Reformation as two manifestations of the same retreat from the exacting moral and intellectual responsibilities of Western civilization.”

Of the two forces of pseudo-morphosis thus identified, one is obvious, but the other will startle most of our educated contemporaries. Both require some consideration, since the thesis of The Might of the West depends upon them.

Mr. Brown has the courage to state explicitly an indubitable fact that most historians timidly evade or leave to be inferred from hints and ambiguities, lest they expose themselves to fanatical reprisals. In the decaying Roman Empire, Christianity was devised by the Jews who had long before infiltrated all the prosperous parts of it to exploit the inhabitants. Most of those Jews, as is common in Jewish colonies, knew only one language, the one required by their business. They spoke and read the Greek koine, which was the language of international commerce and industry at that time, known throughout the Roman Empire and in a large part of Asia outside its boundaries. The koine, furthermore, was the only language generally known throughout the populous regions of the Empire that lay east of Italy; and in some of the larger cities of the west it was the language habitually spoken by large sections of the lower classes. Where Latin was the language of the common people or useful for penetrating higher circles, Jews naturally learned Latin, and it may be that where Latin was the common tongue, low-grade Jews, engaged in petty retail trade, knew only Latin, but the Greek koine, not any Semitic dialect, was the language of the international Jews.

These enterprising Jews knew their own pseudo-historical myths only in the text of the Septuagint, which, finally assembled early in the first century B.C., is the oldest form of the so-called Old Testament and does not show the excisions and revisions made in the much later text in Hebrew and Aramaic that Christians now strangely consider more “authoritative.” And the Jewish merchants, slave-dealers, and financiers in the great cities of the Empire can have had little interest in, and perhaps little knowledge of, the numerous goëtae who agitated the squalid peasants of Palestine with their futile claims to be christs.

What the prosperous and superficially civilized Jews of the Empire may have privately believed cannot, of course, be ascertained: it is likely that they differed among themselves and changed their opinions over the years. They must have seen the obvious profit to be derived from peddling a religion that emphasized their great racial superiority as the Chosen People while enabling them to convert and control a large population that would have refused to submit to the barbarous sexual mutilation and absurd taboos enjoined by “orthodox” Judaism. The new cult, ostensibly based on a special message from Yahweh transmitted through a christ in a remote and little-known region of the Empire, was an ideal instrument of proselytism: it appealed to the malice and resentments of the mongrel proletariat, while enjoining on them conduct that inhibited resentment of the Jews’ commercial practices. And it served as a cover for Bolshevik agitation that could not be identified as exclusively Jewish and would keep the consciousness of the masses permanently focused on exciting illusions and fanatical controversies.

This explains what would be otherwise mysterious. When one Christian sect prudently modified its revolutionary activity sufficiently to convince despots that it could be a useful support of their power, their first concern was to extirpate the large and, it seems, politically passive Christian sects that rejected the Jewish Septuagint. As Mr. Brown observes, the largest of these sects, the Marcionists, were the really “gentile” Christians, and their suppression would be a paradox, if one believed that the so-called New Testament, which was put together to provide an “authority” for denouncing them, had actually been intended to show a new dispensation by an omniscient god who had changed his mind about his former pets. And this explains why it was only later, after the “orthodox” sect had acquired governmental power, that the Christian mobs, described, e.g., by Libanius, surged through the predominantly Greek cities of the Empire, pillaging and looting the property of their betters and murdering “pagans.” The non-Jewish Christian sects had to be disposed of first.

Mr. Brown devotes a large section of his book to his reconstruction of the obscure history of early Christianity, but we need not follow him through that dismal swamp of fiction, forgery, and fraud. It was the “orthodox” version which, with slight variations, was imposed on the Germanic tribes who took over the European parts of the dying Empire. In their ignorance, they believed the Bible to be an historical record of events that had actually taken place at specified times in known parts of the world, and they therefore accepted it as proof of the intentions and power of a god to whose will and caprices men had to conform, however immoral or unreasonable the divine edicts might appear to mortals.

The Might of the West gives us the clearest and most cogent summary I have seen of the intellectual development of our civilization in the Middle Ages. As seeds sprout beneath a layer of fertilizing compost and send their shoots up through it, so the native rationality of our race grew up through the protective mantle of its religion. The Scholastics labored to make the cult logically intelligible, and at the same time they virtually founded modern mathematics. The better minds saw through the veil of Christian ignorance and rediscovered such fundamental facts of the real world as the sphericity of the earth. Technology, the source of our unique power, began more and more to harness the forces of nature by, for example, building windmills and watermills, breeding sturdy draft horses, inventing an efficient harness for them, and so nicely computing stresses that the audaciously soaring architecture of the Gothic became possible. The feudal rulers, furthermore, gave formal assent to the religion, but conducted their affairs with worldly prudence, while good society insisted on standards of personal honor, honesty, valor, and chivalry for which there was no sanction in the supposed revelations of their deity. Christianity was being gradually but surely civilized.

Our contemporaries generally accept as a truism the view that men’s minds were fettered by superstitions about the supernatural until they were emancipated by the Humanism of the Renaissance, but thoughtful students will at least admit that the proposition is open to doubt. Egon Friedell may not greatly exaggerate when, in the first volume of his Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, he claims that Nominalism, which was the final and greatest triumph of the Scholastics and antedated even the earliest symptoms of the Renaissance, was more decisive in its effect on our history than the invention of gunpowder or of printing. Nominalism illuminated the impassable gulf between our racially instinctive standards of morality and the tales in the Bible. It did not question the historicity of those stories or expressly repudiate the religion, but it did make it incontestable that the god who was an accomplice of the Jews when they swindled the Egyptians and stole their property obviously offended our concept of justice. The only escape from that dilemma was to regard as just whatever that capricious and ferocious god did, however repugnant his conduct was to us. Could the Catholic unity of Christendom have been indefinitely preserved after that demonstration?

Mr. Brown does not ignore that question, although he does not press the point as far as he might in support of his contention that Humanism was a bane, rather than a benefit, to our civilization. He admits that “It is, of course, a fair question whether the Western Catholic Church could ever have been Westernized sufficiently to keep within it scientific thought and still retain enough of the sacred tradition to be considered Christian.” The crux here lies, perhaps, in the fact that Nominalists invariably affirm their unquestioning belief in the prevailing religion. When such affirmations are made in the Renaissance by such highly intelligent men as Laurentius Valla or Pomponatius, we naturally scent protective hypocrisy, although they may have sincerely been unwilling to disturb the social order, and would have made the same asseverations, had they been able to do so with impunity. We do not like to think of Mediaeval men in the same terms, and when we do, we must remain undecided. The great Nominalists were all ecclesiastics, and we can never know whether William of Occam, for example, was personally so devout that he never questioned his faith or had an understandable desire not to be incinerated—or an equally understandable desire to continue untroubled enjoyment of his sacred perquisites—or had a prudent prevision of the catastrophes that afflicted Europe when the empire of the Church and the unity of Christendom was shattered. The important point, perhaps, is that if there was scepticism or disbelief, it was not expressed in any form that could agitate the masses.

To any unprejudiced mind, the Protestant Reformation was a catastrophe. Europe was fragmented by irreconcilable hatreds which endure to the present day. Endless and almost innumerable wars were waged, not rationally for political or economic ends, but insanely to enforce obscure and paradoxical doctrines that the various Christian sects today have discarded as nugatory or illusory. For more than two centuries, the best blood of Europe continually drenched battlefields and washed city streets as men, inflamed with pious blood-lust, butchered their kinsmen in frantic efforts to deliver their omnipotent god from the clutches of the Antichrist. The genetic loss, which fell heaviest upon the northern countries, was great beyond calculation. Historians estimate that in just one of the many Wars of Religion, two-thirds of the population of Germany perished; and while that is an extreme example of the power of Faith, no country in Europe failed to sacrifice a part of its population to please Yahweh.

The intellectual and moral disasters matched the genetic. For more than two centuries, most of the intellectual energies of Europe, which could have been devoted to science and useful scholarship, were diverted from the tasks of civilization and squandered on interminable argumentation about holy ghosts, goblins, and witches. In their efforts to solve God’s puzzles, the clergy on both sides had to learn God’s own language, Hebrew, and cognate dialects; and Jewish influence became ascendent, sometimes paramount, through both the Old Testament and the theosophical rodomontade of the Kabbalah. And on the Protestant side, the fragmentation continued until any crack-brained tailor, disgruntled wife, or clever con man could have a revelation of what the Scriptural conundrums really meant and set up in business as an heresiarch.

During the Middle Ages, it is true, there were some outbreaks of religious hysteria, but the Church kept them under control. With the Reformation, the brain fever became epidemic. What was novel about it was that Biblical texts were used to incite revolutionary agitation among the masses, and civil wars. Whether or not the initiators foresaw the consequences of their arson, the blaze, once kindled, became a conflagration that swept over all Europe and mentally stultified it for centuries and even to the present day, especially now in such basically Christian heresies as Marxism and “Liberalism,” which claim to be atheistic but obviously must believe in the Devil, whose malevolent disciples, particularly “Fascists” and “racists,” they righteously long to exterminate.

What is startling about this book is the identification of Humanism as another deadly pseudo-morphosis. The usual view is that the Renaissance was an antidote to Christianity, and some scholars, such as Émile Callot, not only recognize the Reformation as (I translate) “a violent regression to the Middle Ages, by which the limpid stream of ancient wisdom would be contaminated for two centuries,” but argue that, strictly speaking, the Reformation was the effective end of the Renaissance. Mr. Brown sees matters quite differently. For him, the Renaissance was a second and simultaneous disaster. It was a pseudo-morphosis, an attempt to revive the Classical civilization, which had no legitimate connection with ours, thus imposing a pernicious illusion that long distorted our culture and, like the Reformation, prevented us from becoming aware of our true identity. He has thus neatly offended both the credulous and the educated among our contemporaries.

I shall not attempt to refute Mr. Brown. I can understand and sympathize with his position. It is quite true that the supreme question of elegance in Latin style, the Humanists’ absolute criterion, was not only a potent weapon against the churchmen, but also obfuscated intellectual issues. That tendency was inherent in the movement from the first. After the Reformation set Europe ablaze, we naturally make great allowances for scholars deficient in philoparaptesism (as they sardonically termed a willingness to be roasted for the glory of God), and we wonder what was inwardly believed by men who outwardly conformed to the official cult of the region in which they lived and even found gainful employment in employing their learning in its service. Before that catastrophe, however, there is less uncertainty. We are saddened, for example, when we see Petrarch, who is generally accounted the first of the Humanists, in violent controversy with the Averroists, who represented in their way the rational tendency of our civilization, because their Latin was barbarous, and it is with compassion that we see him dote on the ravings of Augustine and also carry our instinctive veneration for womanhood to the point of a mystical and more than romantic gynaeolatry. When we read Attilio Nulli’s study of Erasmus, we agree that the great scholar ought not to have been a Christian, even while we have to admit that the evidence shows that he, however inconsistently, probably had a genuine faith in doctrines taken from the New Testament, even though he deplored the irreversible error that had saddled the Church with such embarrassing and compromising baggage as the Old. And we are saddened to see him launch diatribes against his fellow scholars who used the literary convention of a strict Ciceronianism as a mask for their own irreligion—as, indeed, some scholarly churchmen continued to do until the middle of the Eighteenth Century.

It is true that, as R. R. Bolgar has said and Mr. Brown would not deny, the Humanists and their disciples turned to the great classics of Graeco-Roman antiquity not only as masters of literature but “above all as masters in the art of living,” and they saw in the society of the great ages of Greece and Rome a model to be imitated, so far as possible, in the modern world. One consequence of this, which may be cardinal in Mr. Brown’s thinking, will be noticed below.

Whether or not Mr. Brown is right, it must be observed that he writes with a polemic animus against Graeco-Roman culture, often underestimates or misrepresents the facts, and is sometimes led by his polemical ardor into ludicrous statements, of which the very worst is to be found in his comparison of the Hindu and Classical cultures on page 121. Mr. Brown knows very well that the Parthenon is not built of wood; that Athens was a thalassocracy and that Rome was a great naval power after 260 B.C.; that the poems of Homer were not first written down in the time of Marcus Aurelius; that the Greek alphabet was in use nine centuries before that time; and that Greek was written (in a syllabic script) and records kept as early as the thirteenth century B.C. Mr. Brown knew all that, of course, but his temper momentarily got the better of him, and a judicious reader, even if not charitable, will overlook this and other lapses, which are really irrelevant to the main argument.

Mr. Brown’s disparagement of the Classical civilization and his certainty that it was foreign to our own are based on its failure to develop a comparable technology. He was, perhaps, less than generous when he failed to mention that the epistemology of the New Academy, known to everyone through Cicero’s Academica, is precisely what is taken for granted in the methodology of modern science, but the problem is a real one, and I do not profess to know the answer. We should not try to evade it by observing that modern respect for ancient technology has greatly increased since the discovery of a machine, hyperbolically called a computer, for astronomical calculations, nor should we speculate about the possible prevalence in ancient society of the sentiment that led Vespasian to reject labor-saving machinery because it would deprive workmen of a livelihood. (See Suetonius, Vesp. 18.) There is no escaping the fact that the Greeks and Romans never had steamships, railways, or cannon. But our author could profit, I think, from reconsideration of some points in his argument.

He mentions, for example, the development of cannon. As everyone knows (and has recently been demonstrated by such developments as radar, atomic fusion, and guided missiles) the necessities of war are the mother of invention, and the major technical advances are the direct or indirect results of military need. The need to cast bigger and better cannon created the metallurgical skill without which most subsequent machines of any kind, to say nothing of steamships and railways, would have been impossible. Now one reason why the modern world developed cannon and the ancient world did not may be the fact that the Western world had lost the art of constructing the great torsion-artillery of Hellenistic times, which was superior in both hitting power and rate of fire to any cannon that Europe was able to produce for two centuries after cannon were first introduced. (See Erwin Schramm, Die antiken Geschütze der Saalburg, Berlin, 1918; cf. E. W. Marsden, Greek and Roman Artillery, Oxford, 1969).

Is technology the sole criterion? And is there not a radical difference between Mr. Brown’s two instances of pseudo-morphosis? The religious one was injected into our culture at its very inception, was enforced by fear of a terrible god whose existence and power was not doubted, and became the basis of all social organization from the very first. If Humanism was also a pseudo-morphosis, it was spontaneously and voluntarily adopted by Europe when our civilization was, on Mr. Brown’s own showing, in a quite advanced stage. It corresponded to no political, social, or economic imperative; it was fostered by no organization or class in its own interest; and it so appealed to the minds of our race that it triumphed over the determined and vigorous opposition of a large part of the Christian clergy, who rightly foresaw in it a threat to their business. In fact, I learn from the Jewish Chronicle (London) that even today an active admiration of Classical culture is a “fight against the Judaeo-Christian tradition” and that something so horribly “anti-Semitic” ought to be suppressed as “Fascism.”

The Classical world of antiquity must have captivated the modern mind through some charm, beauty, or world-view inherent in its surviving literature. From the end of the Fifteenth Century to the beginning of the Twentieth, our civilization voluntarily so identified itself with the Graeco-Roman that it devoted the greater part of the youth of every educated man to the extremely difficult and even painful task of so mastering the modalities of Classical thought that he could think directly in Latin and Greek and thus compose both prose and verse in those languages in conformity with the purest models and the most exacting standards. For that vast expenditure of intellectual energy there is no analogy in recorded history. And if that was pseudo-morphosis, what accounts for so great, so spontaneous, and so continuous an hallucination? One, moreover, that, as Mr. Brown complains, probably did impede the progress of science, technology, and the prosperity they create, since Humanism did divert so much mental energy of superior minds into its own channels.

Why the West turned in admiration to Antiquity is clear, even if we follow Mr. Brown in refusing to see any significance in the fact that the Classical and the Western are the only two civilizations that were created by Aryans—and flourished so long as Aryans remained dominant in their own countries. Apart from the beauty of an unsurpassed literature, and apart from the historical realism that one learns from Thucydides and Tacitus, the modern world sought in the ancient a system of civil ethics and of political life. The great men of antiquity, as their lives are reported, for instance, in Plutarch’s biographies, obeyed standards of personal honor as well as prudence which we instinctively admire, although Christianity contemns them. Cicero, for example, was indeed admired for his eloquence, but no less for his vision of, and devotion to, the Republic. And, as Mr. Brown is well aware, it was the Graeco-Roman conception of a mixed constitution (Cicero, Polybius, Aristotle) that ultimately produced the American Constitution, which most of us regard as a noble effort, even though it failed.

And here at last we have come to the crux of the problem. When I first read Mr. Brown’s breath-taking assertion that the Greeks and Romans lacked “a sense of politics,” I thought that merely another slip of an impassioned pen. But I think he meant precisely what he said, although he refrained from developing his point. One of the characteristics that most sharply differentiate the Classical civilization from all others except our own is its idea that a highly civilized people is capable of self-government through elected officers. The Greeks and Romans, so long as they controlled their own countries, were devoted to democracy in the ancient sense of that word, that is to say, government of which the policies are determined by a limited body of responsible citizens, who must be free, economically as well as politically, and thus must necessarily be supported by a subject mass of slaves or the equivalent. (Needless to say, the current notion that every anthropoid is entitled to a vote to express his whims is a form of gibbering idiocy that was unknown in Antiquity.) All the political convulsions of Graeco-Roman history arose from either divisions within the limited body of citizens or disputes about the most expedient extension or contraction of the franchise. It is true that no ancient state ever succeeded in stabilizing a constitution by which the franchise was so nicely adjusted that it was large enough to avert rule by self-interested cabals and small enough to exclude the feckless and ignorant, but the principle that free and responsible citizens (to the exclusion of slaves, proletarians, and aliens) were sovereign was maintained even in the Roman Empire until the Romans were supplanted by the descendants of their former slaves and subjects, especially wily Levantines, to whose radically different minds the very concept of political freedom and personal self-respect was childish and repugnant.

Now if it be true that our people’s infatuation with systems of elected government sprang from an attempt to imitate the politics of a civilization whose literature we admire, then the Renaissance was, as Mr. Brown claims, a pseudo-morphosis, and practically all of our political theory since the Sixteenth Century was an alien importation that the West, through a gross misunderstanding of itself, permitted to pervert its own nature and to drive it to an endless series of calamities. The true form of Western government, therefore, must be found in a stable hierarchical system based on personal loyalties and status within a virtually closed society, preferably the feudal system at its best or an adaptation of the Mediaeval polity to present conditions. The proximate collapse of the ochlocracy to which Americans are now mindlessly devoted will lend cogency to that proposition.

Our conceptions of history have inescapable consequences, and the consequences of Lawrence Brown’s historical analysis will startle and dismay most of the readers of Instauration. The second thesis of The Might of the Westwill particularly distress everyone who has not been cowed into pretending that races do not exist and who hopes that there still is a residual instinct of self-preservation in a large part of our own race, for if the Renaissance was a vast pseudo-morphosis, we must recognize the utter folly of trying to imitate a dead and alien civilization in the mad hope that we can succeed where it so notoriously failed. We must therefore purge our minds of the very notion of majority rule and all that it implies. It is not enough to recognize the suicidal insanity that has now enslaved us to our parasites and eternal enemies, for it would be equally unnatural to vest power in a legitimate majority of responsible citizens. We must even discard aristocratic dreams of rule by a majority of a highly select minority. It is idle to inquire whether the American Constitution failed because the requirements of property that entitled men to vote were set too low, or because it did not prohibit the immigration of Jews and other unassimilable aliens. It is futile to speculate whether the principle of human freedom and republican government could have been saved, had the Confederacy defeated the fanatical invaders and vindicated its independence. It is absurd to consider, as some of our more intelligent contemporaries are now doing, the creation of a viable society by resurrecting the Servian constitution described in Cicero’s De republica, substituting for property criteria of measured intelligence or racial purity. The very concept of self-government is like the Ptolemaic astronomy, which could not be saved by positing more epicycles or modifying it, as did Tycho Brahe, to eliminate the more glaring discrepancies: it was the basic idea that the heavens revolved about the earth that had to be discarded.

If the Renaissance was a delusion, we are deluding ourselves so long as we tinker with the Graeco-Roman idea of self-government—fatally deluding ourselves about the nature of Western man. In our civilization, the natural and requisite government must not only be completely authoritarian, but must be one of which the inner structure and purposes are concealed from the majority by means of a religion or equivalent faith to which citizens and masses alike will give implicit and unquestioning obedience. Mr. Brown explicitly warns us that

We should not fool ourselves into supposing that the core and source of strength of Western civilization can ever win the conscious applause of the great bulk of Westerners. Unconsciously they live by and treasure the standards of their civilization, but the intellectual acknowledgment of these standards runs counter to so many demands of self-esteem and self-justification, of childish hopes and pathetic dreams that most men can never verbally make this acknowledgment even secretly to themselves.

It follows, therefore, that so long as our civilization endures, ours must necessarily be “an esoteric, not a popular society.” If the West is to be preserved from the death that now seems imminent, it must be brought again under the control of Western minds, who, whatever the outward professions they may deem it expedient to make, will recognize and foster, quietly and more or less secretly, the implacably objective science that has “created the unique greatness of our society.”

It will have been seen that the problem whether our civilization is in its fundamental nature linked to, or totally independent of, the Classical has immediate and drastic implications for us. I have sought to elucidate the question, not to answer it. I shall only add that although Mr. Brown admits that “a connection between biology and civilization is an obvious historical fact,” and although he perceives that the Levantine mentality is totally incompatible with, and inimical to, our own, he does not consider the possibly relevant fact that the Classical, like all the civilizations known to history, declined and perished with the deterioration, mongrelization, and supersession of the race that created it. (The biological facts have most recently been set forth by Elmer Pendell in Why Civilizations Self-Destruct, Howard Allen, 1977.) Whatever weight we accord to this fact, we may be confident, I think, that Mr. Brown understands that his own premises require racial homogeneity in at least the élite of the West, and that only a scientifically rigorous system of eugenics can produce men of the rare intellectual capacity and the rarer dedication that will make them both able and willing to bear the enormous burden of high civilization.

Every reader must decide for himself how much of Mr. Brown’s analysis he will accept, but in so doing he will have been forced to face the fact that “the greatest ethical problem of our lifetime is to keep our society alive.” The word ‘ethical’ is well-chosen, for there can be no morality higher than one which will deliver us from “the ruin we have fought two world wars to achieve.” That profound perception alone would suffice to make The Might of the West one of the great achievements of the Western mind.

(October, 1979)

Unfortunately, the book which Dr. Oliver reviews here is no longer in print. Used copies are occasionally procurable at a high price. If there are any benefactors willing to finance a reprint, with Dr. Oliver’s brilliant review included as a foreword, please contact me via the links at the top of this page. — Kevin Alfred Strom.

[thechasefiles]

The Chase Files Daily Newscap 1/23/2019

Good MORNING #realdreamchasers! Here is The Chase Files Daily News Cap for Wednesday 23RD January 2019. Remember you can read full articles for FREE via Barbados Today (BT) or Barbados Government Information Services (BGIS) OR by purchasing by purchasing a MidWeek Nation Newspaper (MWN).

DLP, UPP BEMOAN COUNTRY’S DIRECTION – As Barbadians are called on by the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) to reflect on the life of Errol Barrow, the United Progressive Party (UPP) is arguing that Barbados is currently in a “mid-life crisis”. In a short Errol Barrow Day message yesterday, president of the DLP Verla De Peiza called on Barbadians to reflect and apply the lessons of Barrow’s life “to ensure that what we are doing at this moment can impact just as significantly on the generations to come”. She also called on citizens to come up with ideas that could be shared to improve in the development of the country. “What we recognize though is that each one of us as a people and as a country, has a responsibility to this country. What can we do to make ourselves better as a collective? That will be the focus of what we wish to reflect on as we work through this week as we take our initiatives forward and bring them to the country,” said De Peiza. However, in a letter to the ‘Father of Independence’, the UPP recalled his achievements including the implementation of free education, a national insurance and social security scheme, school meals, improvements in the health sector and his contribution to the island’s independence. At the same time, the UPP, in its Facebook post, recalled that the DLP had lost every seat in the May 24 general election, as it questioned the direction in which the country was currently heading. “With democracy so active you would believe that Barbados is heading into a future based on the foundation of education, pride and industry. Unfortunately, the story of modern Barbados has veered sharply away from your vision,” the UPP said in its letter to “the Dipper”. “We are witnessing a culture which doesn’t value education and its potential benefits and the squandering of this opportunity by many who have achieved accreditation. The severe lack of critical thinking in the management of the country’s affairs at all levels has led to a downward trend in the rating and recognition of Barbados as a leader amongst developing nations. This seems to be as a direct result of greed and a lack of understanding of the principles established by the founding fathers,” the UPP said. The party, which is led by Lynette Eastmond, a former Barbados Labour Party government minister, said despite the abolition of slavery and colonialism “at the legislative and societal levels”, it was still evident “at the psychological level”, even among our educated elected leaders. The political party said it was evident that there was no intention by authorities to empower Barbadians through economic enfranchisement. “Every election cycle sees a return and deepening of the relationship between parties and the class of wealthy whose contribution to national development must equate with contractual expectations. In the meantime, many of our people celebrate only in political tribalism and fleeting handouts. “Furthermore, the foundation of our economy has been eroded to the point where the new norm is the celebration of the acquisition of foreign loans, disbursement of crown lands at an undervalue and the arrival of new garbage trucks. This economic enslavement keeps our nation in the doldrums of development and demonstrates the lack of visionary leadership once associated with regional leaders such as yourself. We are currently at 50 plus years of independence in a mid-life crisis as our national leadership has been contaminated by the influences of Neo-colonialism and blinded by post-independence partisan agendas,” the UPP added. The UPP said in its letter to Barrow that Barbadians were more about politics than transparent good governance, adding that this defied the legacy he tried to create for the country. “We must find the motivation to correct this downslide but with so many bought into the false narrative we fear for the future,” it said. “We in the United Progressive Party believe that you would be pleased at the development of a party which sees true empowerment as the next big step in our democracy. Our leaders have a vision which is consistent with yours,” it added. Former Barbados Labour Party (BLP) Member of Parliament and representative for Christ Church West, Dr. Maria Agard, who is now a member of the UPP, commented on the Facebook post, saying Barbadians have lost the notion of the “big idea, having been conditioned and bullied into celebrating mediocrity”. “We now clap for shady governance once it has been packaged in the right PR narrative, seemingly unable to separate the sleight of hand from the outcomes. We must strive for progress where morality and ethics are fundamental planks of that progress,” said Agard. “As for the Dipper’s vision. He must be weeping into his ashes to see that the free universal education that he fought for has been used to enrich a select few as we sell our brilliance, our skills, our services cheaply to moguls as their employees, while scorning the indigenous entrepreneurs who struggle to forge a legacy of wealth independent of the trappings of the plantation,” she added.  (BT)

PARTY SEEKING MONETARY BENEFITS – One of Barbados’ leading political scientists believes the new political party which is soon to be introduced is being assembled for purely financial gain. Head of the Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES) Peter Wickham has thrown cold water on the possibility of Opposition Leader Reverend Joseph Atherley forming a “legitimate” political party. On Saturday at a press conference, Atherley, a former member of the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) introduced a team of 14 persons, whom he said would speak on behalf of the Opposition on national issues. And while he indicated that it was not the launch of a political party, he said that would occur in due course. However, Wickham told Barbados TODAY he believed the party was only being formed to get the quarter million dollar subvention granted to political parties by government. “I’m not impressed. It sounds to me like a party that is formed in pursuit of a cause, the cause of course being the fact that they can benefit from the $250 000 set aside for political parties. Frankly, I’m not understanding the philosophical relationship between the individual parties. It seems like a group that was just drawn together on the basis of convenience,” Wickham said. “You have people for example like the senator, the economist, who has indicated that she is not political, but notwithstanding she is now a senator in a political party. “I’ve never heard Caswell Franklyn speak of his political allegiance to any central philosophy that resolves around Reverend Atherley. And then we look at Reverend Atherley himself, who was a sworn member of the BLP up until a few months ago, who said he was leaving that party even though he identifies with a lot of the principles. “An individual who won his seat largely on the coattails of Prime Minister Mia Mottley, having previously lost it on two occasions. It doesn’t appear as though the party has any legitimacy quite frankly, and I don’t know that if it were to face the polls it would receive any attention.” Wickham said the manner in which the party was formed was questionable adding that he did not get the feeling that it was being established to serve the public’s interest. “It just seems to be a party cobbled together in support of a financial cause. I wait to be persuaded that it is different, certainly if it is different I would be pleased, but quite frankly I’m not seeing anything in it that tells me this is a genuine, legitimate, political organisation that has been formed to pursue a cause that is central to a philosophy that is expressive like the BLP or the Democratic Labour Party (DLP). I’m not seeing it,” Wickham maintained. He, however, said he believed those persons selected to speak would be given an ear by the media, similarly to members of Solution Barbados and the UPP [United Progressive Party]. While Wickham said he would love for Atherley to call a by-election to see if his constituents in St Michael West would return him to office on a different seat, he said it was not expected. “I would love if he did, but I know he’s not going to. Reverend Atherley is no fool and he understands that if he goes back to the polls he would be obliterated because he knows his own weaknesses and vulnerability so he won’t do that. “But I think on principle it would be a good thing for him to do, because if he did that it would clarify any misconceptions that persons like myself would have…but in the meantime, we are left to wonder about his legitimacy,” Wickham said. (BT)

‘JUST ANOTHER GROUP OF BEES’ – “A grouping of disgruntled former Barbados Labour Party (BLP) members.” This is how the president of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) Verla De Peiza, has described Opposition Leader Joseph Atherley’s recently-named shadow cabinet. At face value, Atherley’s Opposition group appears to be a melting pot of candidates from several parties who contested the general elections last May. However, De Peiza charged that upon closer inspection she realised that many of the persons chosen were affiliated at some stage with the ruling BLP administration. “Perusing the names, I see exclusively disgruntled past members of the Barbados Labour Party. None of those persons are in line with the ideals that our party stands for,” said De Peiza, accounting for the fact that apart from the DLP, the new political group was able to attract defectors from most the parties that contested the last election. Among the political parties represented are Solutions Barbados and the United Progressive Party (UPP) and the Barbados Integrity Movement. The DLP president told Barbados TODAY that her party was on the verge of launching its own shadow Cabinet. She explained that this new group would consist of persons who have expressed an interest in representing the party, which failed to retain a single seat when it was ousted from power by the BLP. “We have not named any candidates, so we definitely cannot say that this group will be future candidates. Right now, we have a mixture of persons who have indicated their interest . . . and there are several more besides them and we are presently going through our process but with regards to the shadow group, that is going to be announced very soon,” she said. It was on Saturday that Atherley announced a team he said would speak on behalf of the Opposition on national issues. His two Opposition Senators, Crystal Drakes and Caswell Franklyn, are to be spokespersons for the Opposition on issues of national importance. He said three more people would be added to that group of senators at a later date. The Opposition group also consists of former Solutions Barbados candidates Scott Weatherhead, Alan Springer, Irvin Belgrave, Rev. John Carter and Paul Gibson. Sylvan Greenidge from the BIM, lecturer Dr Philip Corbin as well as Akil Daley, have also answered Atherley’s call. “This is, for me as Leader of the Opposition, a proud moment. I believe it is for our country a historic moment,” Atherley said on Saturday. However, De Peiza made it clear that she has no intention to be dismissive of the new political grouping and she was adopting a wait-and-see approach before making any judgment on their relevance. “We will never be dismissive of anyone’s attempts to represent the country, but I believe that time will speak to their effectiveness. We have to see what their plans are and how they treat to the issues facing the country,” she said. The former DLP senator also did not rule out the possibility of collaborative efforts between the DLP shadow Cabinet and the Opposition group, providing that their concerns and objectives overlap. “We will work with whomsoever meets our own philosophical objectives. At the end of the day it comes down to doing what is best for the country,” she explained. (BT)

WEST COAST WARNING – The mess that took place on the south coast cannot be allowed to float to Barbados’ platinum coast. According to Minister of Tourism and International Transport, Kerrie Symmonds, the sewage crisis that severely affected the south coast would wreak havoc on Barbados’ bread and butter if it touches the west coast where the island’s upscale properties are located. Speaking at the annual general meeting of the Department of Emergency Management St James Central Emergency Organization, held at Queen’s College School Hall, Sunday evening, Symmonds said that Government sees the south coast crisis as a disaster. He said the crisis which affected the coast for three years resulted in Barbados’ major source markets issuing public health advisories to their citizens. Pointing out that Barbados was experiencing financial difficulties, Symmonds said the country has had to rescue itself from the mess created by the south coast sewage disaster. “The country also now had to turn its attention to Bridgetown because the Bridgetown situation was borderline, about to become as bad as the south coast. And the fact of the matter is that while you have wrestled those two we have to turn our attention eventually to the west coast and begin from scratch. It is the platinum coast because that is where the most expensive part of the tourism product is found. “The properties that at this time of the year are being rented at the start at $2,000 United States dollars per night, at the lowest level and at the highest level can run into $30,000 or $40,000 United States dollars. But if you destroy that coast, then I need not tell you that you destroy the economy of Barbados,” he warned. Symmonds also indicated that the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) administration intended to have all future Government bonds include a natural disaster clause. He said such a necessary move would allow the state to put a two-year pause on the payment of interests and principal on those bonds, that gives Government the elbow room to finance rebuilding processes without having to incur debt to do so. Symmonds explained that the clause would help Barbados which is already in a precarious and dangerous position of being the third most indebted country in the world, to be able to carry another generation of Barbadians forward, even if there was a national tragedy. “In the event of a disaster taking place, for example, and heaven forbid, that Barbados was confronted with the tragedy that confronted Dominica, or the tragedy that confronted Barbuda, those kinds of tragedies would confront a Government with the requirement, to have to finance the rebuilding process by incurring debt. Remember, Government must continue. “So when that tragedy happens and you lose 80 or 90 percent of your housing stock, Government can’t just sit down and do nothing. You have to go into the international market and you have to borrow money. And where it is still possible in the domestic economy, you’ve got to borrow more money, so you go to entities that still exist, even if only in law, like the National Insurance Scheme, to put yourself in a position to do the rebuilding,” he said. Noting that the matter of ensuring Barbados is physically and financially ready to deal with the aftermath of a national disaster had not escaped Cabinet’s attention, Minister Symmonds said that even though the public’s purse does not have sufficient funds to correct it all at once, the time has come where the country must recognize that fundamental parts of the island’s utilities infrastructure needed to be repositioned. “For example, the overhead wires which are used by the Barbados Light & Power (BL&P), which are used by the telephone company, we have to be very aware of the impact of a major hurricane on that infrastructure. “I go back to the point of departure. We are not in a financial position now to do it all at once. But as we go forward, part of the corrective process, and certainly the thinking of the Government is that we must now use the opportunity where it arises, when it arises within reason, because it is a heavy financial commitment, to begin to place some of that overhead infrastructure underground,” he said. Symmonds said that whenever a hurricane affects a country, as was clearly seen when major hurricanes devastated several Caribbean territories in 2017, power lines fall and meet flooded waters, putting residents at major safety risk. “The telephone pole has fallen and the wires are on the ground, people do not know what is in a four-foot or three-foot flood zone of water so they walk through the water because they don’t know that there is livewire underneath there and then they get shocked and electrocuted. This has happened time after time across this region, and part of what we must do in terms of preparing ourselves in terms of disaster management, is to fix that situation,” Symmonds said.  (BT)

CAHILL ISSUE NOT DEAD – The ghost of the controversial Cahill waste to energy project has apparently returned to haunt the new Mia Mottley Government. This morning Minister of the Environment and National Beautification, Trevor Prescod, expressed surprise that legal issues surrounding the $700 million plasma gasification project, which was dumped by the then Freundel Stuart administration, has resurfaced three years later. “There has been some communication to Government from some new entity representing that agency. I can’t say if it is a lawsuit but it appears there is some element of Cahill in the business and politics of Barbados. The presence of Cahill and its agents is still very much here,” lamented Prescod. It was last Tuesday that Prime Minister Mottley revealed in Parliament that Government received legal correspondence from a successor entity, seeking to assert legal rights in the abandoned project. “Yesterday I received a letter from the successor entity to Cahill seeking to claim legal rights against the Government of Barbados,” Mottley said charging these were “contracts signed under the cover of night before the Cabinet of Barbados got to see them”. This morning Prescod opted not to go into detail about the nature of the redress being sought nor any possible financial exposure to the taxpayers of Barbados. While in Opposition the BLP had demanded clarity on the details of the agreement between Government and the Guernsey-based Cahill Energy in March 2014, which resulted in a huge outcry from the public. According to then Minister of the Environment, Denis Lowe, the decision to halt the multimillion-dollar project, which was to be based at Vaucluse, St Thomas, had taken into consideration events in London and other places, which had revealed that waste-to-energy operations and plasma gasification projects had shown up significant flaws. “So I assure the public today the Government ain’t going nowhere with that option. It can’t do it, not after the fact that so many Barbadians made their voices heard and told their Government ‘be cautious, hold back on this thing’. We don’t understand it enough. There are other options we can explore. The Government of Barbados would have to be absolutely collectively mad to move ahead on an option where there is global evidence that there are flaws with the technology,” Lowe said back then. Minister of Energy Wilfred Abrahams, who was an Opposition Senator at the time and a lawyer for groups opposed to the construction of the waste-to-energy plant, cautioned that Government would have to fork out a “substantial sum” in penalties for breaching its agreement with the Guernsey-based energy firm. He claimed back then that there was a “done deal” in place, which called for Government to provide all of the garbage needed for plasma gasification. Abrahams also said Government had ensured that the necessary legislation had been passed in both Houses of Parliament for the acquisition of lands at Vaucluse, St Thomas for the project, for which he contended the country could not meet the garbage requirement and would, therefore, have had to import waste. “The minister needs to say what is the Government of Barbados’ exposure, and as a consequence, yours and my exposure as taxpayers, for breaching this Cahill contract,” Abrahams argued. He had charged that the Stuart administration had previously denied entering into the agreement with Cahill and only admitted to it when they eventually announced that the project was dead. “They [Government] went recklessly, irresponsibly, selfishly, under the cover of darkness and entered an agreement that they refused to accept, up to the time the minister said they were no longer going ahead with it,” argued Abrahams. (BT)

FOCUS ON DOING BUSINESS BETTER – Government is on a mission to improve this country’s ranking on the Doing Business record in an effort to attract more investment. Word of this has come from Minister in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Investment Marsha Caddle, who announced today that a Doing Business subcommittee is to be established in that regard. Addressing the first Planning and Development Bill stakeholder review for 2019 at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre, Caddle said once approved by Cabinet, this subcommittee would work closely with a Competitiveness Council to ensure Barbados climbed the Doing Business ranks and measure up more favourably among the best. “This is not to have general discussions about productivity and ideological and philosophical discussions about competitiveness . . . but these committees are to get to the business of improving the doing business rankings, not just so they look good on paper, even though that is important to help drive investment to the country, but improving these indicators so that Barbados works for Barbadians and those who want to come and live and work here,” said Caddle. “So we have made a commitment to get to the root and the heart and nuts and bolts of what is impeding business and investment in the country,” she said. Caddle said she was not satisfied with how Barbados measured up against its Caribbean neighbours in the latest Ease of Doing Business Report. Barbados was ranked 129th out of 190 countries in the 2018 Ease of Doing Business Report, a slight improvement over the 132nd position in 2017. “We looked across the indicators that were measured . . . and in the rankings, dealing with construction permits for Barbados, it is ranked 154, so it is the second worse after Haiti. Now my colleagues from Town and Planning will say it is question of how the data is collected, how it is compiled and that may be so. “That is one of the reasons we are establishing a Doing Business subcommittee of Cabinet. Once approved, that will be supported by a competitiveness council, which is a smaller subcommittee of our private sector and trade union colleagues and other parties that will make up that committee,” she said. Caddle said the review and reform of the Town & Planning legislation formed a major part of that plan which is tied to the overall Barbados Economic Recovery and Transformation (BERT) programme, which she insisted was more than just fiscal adjustment. “It is, at its base, about transformation. And we cannot adjust our way out of this crisis that has been a longstanding one in this country, we have to grow and transform our way out. So what it means is that the powers of government are not simply tax and spend, we have to use all the powers of government as legislator to bring about the kind of growth that we want to see,” she said. Also high on the agenda for the first half of this year, she added, was the establishment of a corporate registry to better facilitate individuals and companies that wish to live and invest in Barbados. Caddle also revealed that Prime Minister Mia Mottley would soon be giving details about planned developments for the island’s southwest corridor – from Oistins in Christ Church to Fitts Village in St James. The details could come as early as Friday. She said Government has identified some areas including buildings and properties that “something must be done about”. “This is not just about the action that government takes, it is also about how we can develop public/private partnerships and encourage the kind of investment that is needed in particular in the City,” said Caddle, adding that plans were in the pipeline to make Bridgetown into a “work and residential centre” again. Last month Mottley announced that her plans for the miles of prime real estate, at least from the Savannah Beach Hotel to the former Four Seasons development would include the construction of about a dozen new hotels. (BT)

MINISTER URGES BUSINESS OWNERS TO APPLY FOR LOAN – Government’s election promise to assist hundreds of fledging business owners with trust loans, has resulted in success for some, but has also highlighted the tremendous difficulties faced by others struggling to make a profit in tough economic times. Minister of Small Business, Entrepreneurship and Commerce, Dwight Sutherland revealed that government has so far disbursed $1.6 million to almost 400 small business owners across the country, since the end of October when the program was launched. While visiting five of the successful recipients on Tuesday, Minister Sutherland said another 800 applicants had not yet received money from the fund, but promised that the initiative was far from finished. “Annually we will be putting in $10 million so we know we are nowhere close to our threshold as yet, but we are getting there. It was a successful launch,” said Sutherland, who added that Tuesday’s visit was intended to send a strong signal to the country’s entrepreneurs. “This government is indeed very serious about building out the capacity and the role they play in terms of adding to our Gross Domestic Product… and also to make sure that we don’t only provide the seed capital, but that we put the necessary infrastructure in place to make these businesses successful,” he said. David Harewood, a vendor at the Constitution River Terminal and owner of Liz Catering has been lauded as a success story, after he managed to fully repay the $5000 trust loan given to him last November, while turning a profit. With the money, Harewood invested in a new, health food product and invested the remainder in his pastries. While showering praise on government for its new program, he encouraged “serious” entrepreneurs to get involved. “You have to be serious about what you are doing,” said the longtime vendor. Harewood said he was finalizing plans to get another $5000 trust loan from government to assist in the further expansion of his business. “I plan to get a little warehouse and do the same thing, but my products will be different, my products will be way different,” said the determined businessman. At Victoria Street in the heart of Bridgetown, Naquita Alexander, owner of clothing store La Flam’s, revealed that she was very impressed with the simple process for acquiring the trust loan. She said the loan came in the nick of time and she was able to acquire new stock for the Hennessy Artistry show. Since then however, she said business had been extremely slow, while adding that much of the stock, which was bought with the money from the loan, is yet to be sold off. Naquita further stressed that journey as a small business owner has not been easy and often required tremendous sacrifice. “Coming to work from nine to five and getting no sales. That was really hard, especially when you have to pay the bills at the end of the month and everything keeps piling up because you’re trying to hold on to the business. I’ve been doing this for 11 years,” she said, while adding that, “going to work for someone else would not be an option, because you create debt when you have a business and the pay [as an employee] would not be substantial to pay off your debt.” Minister Sutherland added that in addition to seed capital, many entrepreneurs needed training on how to get the most out of their investments. He added that the much-needed assistance would come from the Financial Literacy Bureau as soon as Friday in the form of a workshop. “It’s not just financial training but also marketing and customer service. We find one of the challenges in this country relates to customer service and we believe if you get repeat customers, it augurs well for your business.” The minister added that the majority of applications for trust loans were coming from stakeholders in services, apparel, agriculture and sporting sectors, but called on members of other key industries to come forward as well. “We would like to see those people in the renewable energy sector and the creative economy. Those are the ones that we will be pushing to come on board, because we need to build out the cultural industries as well,” he said. (BT)

WE WILL FIND YOU – Minister of Small Business, Entrepreneurship and Commerce, Dwight Sutherland has issued a warning to small business owners who have received government’s trust loans, but have no intention of repaying, that government will find them. During his visit to some beneficiaries of the loan today, Sutherland revealed that he was already recognizing a trend where some recipients have shown an unwillingness to repay the up to $5000 loans and who, since receiving the loan could not be found. The loan scheme was launched last October. “There are some people who are in the minority that we are having challenges with in terms of finding them,” he said, while also stressing that such persons were in the minority and “at least 99 per cent” of the persons who would have accessed the loan have repaid. Nevertheless, Sutherland warned that the worrying trend needed to be stamped out. “We [government] have ways and means of recovering our money and I as the minister and indeed the trust fund unit manager will put the necessary systems in place to ensure that we recover the money. “We trust you and we want you to trust yourself . . . the persons who would have accessed the loan and would have benefited in terms of enhancing their business, we want you to do the right thing and repay the loan,” he said. Sutherland acknowledged that in light of the “challenging times”, some business owners may encounter difficulty repaying, but cautioned against dodging government’s loan officers. “At least call the trust loan officer, manager or whoever and say to them ‘we cannot pay this month or I can only pay a small portion of what I am supposed to pay.’ We will work with you,” he promised, “but do not come and take the money with the view that you are not going to repay. We don’t want to go that route. We are here to grow businesses,” he said. Sutherland further stressed that not every successful applicant would be given a $5000 loan because the amount of money loaned would be based on need and on the ministry’s analysis of each business. “If you need $3000 in your business and we analyze that you only need $3000, we are not going to give you $5000. It is based on need and not want, because we have other persons here who really would like to access the funding. We will assess your need and we will give you the funds accordingly,” he said. (BT)

WOMEN SLAIN – The discovery of the bodies of two females over the last 24 hours, about a mile away from each other in St Lucy, has left residents shaken up, shocked and police on the hunt for their killer(s). Around 9:15 a.m. today, the lifeless body of an unidentified female was found lying on her back next to an abandoned car in a bushy area at Northumberland, St Lucy. Police spent several hours combing the bushy area for clues, and investigating the wounds about the body. Police spokesman Station Sergeant Michael Blackman told members of the media who gathered at the scene that wounds were found about the body of the woman who is believed to be in her 60s. “The information that we got came from a resident in the area. The road is pretty lonesome but there are residents who traverse the area from time to time,” Station Sergeant Blackman said. Meanwhile, police are also conducting investigations into the discovery of an unidentified adult female body at River Bay, St Lucy. The body of that woman who lived just a short distance away from where she was discovered around 5:40 p.m. wearing a blue shorts and a grey tube top. There were significant injuries to her head, according to sources. Station Sergeant Blackman told members of the media that police were still in the process of identifying the woman found at River Bay. However residents told Barbados TODAY that the woman’s name was Joanne and that she lived with a partner and two young men. Residents described the woman as a quiet, pleasant and polite individual whom they said did not deserve to die in such a “terrible” way. They said she had been living in the area for about two years. “If she needed anything she asked and I find that people were always willing to give her. She always walked and kept to herself, and never troubled anybody. Her death has left the community in shock and people wondering what could have gone wrong,” one resident said. When contacted, an immediate family member of the deceased told Barbados TODAY that Joanne had not been in contact with relatives for a while, and indicated that they were unable to speak about the deceased. She was reportedly last seen on Friday. The neighboring River Bay and Northumberland communities were quiet when Barbados TODAY visited the areas today. While the majority of residents had gone to work or school, those at home were trying to come to grips with the quickly unfolding developments. A group of elderly women expressed outrage at what they described as an attempt “to paint a bad picture of St Lucy”. “We don’t get these kind of things going on down here. All these people trying to do is to paint a bad picture of St Lucy. I really hope the police find whoever kill them two women. “I don’t know what going on in Barbados, look at that woman get she throat cut at that old people home last night,” one of the elderly women commented, referring to the third murder at a nursing home in Christ Church. Police are appealing to anyone with information on the two matters to contact them with information. Lawmen are also continuing investigations into the death of Martha Doyle, who lived at Unit 2A at the Vauxhall Senior Citizens Village, Vauxhall, Christ Church. Doyle’s throat was said to have been slashed by a male resident on Monday evening while at the home. The Ministry of People Empowerment and Elder Affairs has launched an internal investigation into the circumstances surrounding Doyle’s death. Minister Cynthia Forde, expressed regret at the demise of the 69-year-old and extended condolences to family of the deceased, and to the residents and staff of the Senior Citizens Village. “As we await the outcome of the investigations, both by the Royal Barbados Police Force and ourselves, we have taken immediate steps to provide counselling, facilitated by Network Services, for the residents and staff. “I would wish to assure the families of residents at the village, as well as the general public, that we give high priority to ensuring the safety at all our facilities including this centre, and if necessary, even further steps will be taken to safeguard the continued welfare of residents,” Forde said. The Vauxhall Senior Citizens’ Village is home to 38 residents, 19 men and 19 women, aged 46 to 83 years old. It provides housing for independent living as well as persons who require assistance. (BT)

LIVING IN FEAR – The discovery of four bodies – three women and a man – in the space of 24 hours has thrown some residents into a state of unease. Two of the women, who could not be identified immediately, were found in St Lucy – one at River Bay and the other at Northumberland, just a few minutes driving distance apart. The other female was identified as 69-year-old Martha Doyle, a vendor and resident of the Vauxhall Senior Citizens’ home in Christ Church who died there. Police believed that the proximity and closeness in time of the St Lucy women were mere coincidence. Hours later they had not released the identities of the two victims as they had not been positively identified because of extensive injuries.  The gruesome discovery had the country and residents in the north on edge.  Residents said they believed the woman who was found in River Bay, around 5:40 p.m. on Monday, was well known in the area, with one of them saying he got worried after last seeing her four days ago. (MWN)

PROBE INTO VENDOR’S DEATH – Martha Agatha Doyle, who was found dead at the Vauxhall Senior Citizens’ Village in Vauxhall, Christ Church, on Monday night, is being remembered fondly for her personable character and love for vending. Doyle, 69, lived in Free Hill, Black Rock, St Michael, before moving into the home. According to residents in Free Hill, Doyle, said to be Vincentian-born, lived in that area from the 1980s until about two years ago. She was much patronised for fruits and vegetables as she sold a variety of produce for a living, setting up shop at a small shed close to the Psychiatric Hospital on Black Rock Main Road. Lincoln Connell, a long-time Black Rock resident and one of her customers, said she was a friendly and polite person who always greeted people with a smile. “I knew her for about 30 years,” he said. “She always used to sell in the area. You know that being on the street her ears would always be out there, so she always knew what was going on. She used to sell fruits and vegetables, but after a while sales weren’t too hot so she started selling ornamental plants. In fact, I last saw her on Friday when she was getting ready to leave and go home. (MWN)

ANOTHER MURDER – Police were tonight investigating the murder of Barry Taylor of Shop Hill, St Thomas. The 35-year-old was found beside the road at Cane Garden with stab wounds, not far from the Lester Vaughan Secondary School. Taylor’s bloody and lifeless body was discovered at approximately 6.30 p.m. (BT)

HOT-HEADED HUSBAND – There is a law against posting some things on social media and a young husband found that out today, when he admitted accidentally posting nude pictures of his spouse. Jamar Thomas, 33, of Bartlett’sTenantry, Sargeant’s Village, Christ Church, pleaded guilty to the following charge, that on December 25, 2018, he used a cellular phone to send a message that was indecent or obscene and he intended to cause or was reckless as to whether he caused annoyance, inconvenience or distress to his wife, Alika Thomas. Prosecutor PC Kenmore Phillips, in outlining the matter to the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court presided over by acting Magistrate Anika Jackson, said that the couple had been married for four years, and on Christmas Day last year, they had an argument about Thomas taking up his wife’s phone and reading the messages. According to the prosecutor, Thomas discovered her carrying on a conversation with a male and nude photos of herself were placed on WhatsApp. His wife reported the matter to the police and Thomas turned himself in on January 19. Thomas said that prior to the incident, he had phoned his sister and complained that he was doing all the work and his wife got angry, started to shout and took up his tablet and told him “What is yours is mine and what is mine is yours.” In turn, he said he took up his wife’s phone and said “What is yours is mine and what is mine is yours.” Among other things, Thomas saw some stuff on his wife’s phone including nude videos with his son in the background and he was upset. He said he meant to show them to a woman who counsels them, his head was hot and he sent them on WhatsApp and he later tried to take them down but was not successful. Thomas said he was sorry that it was on social media. The acting magistrate told Thomas “I have taken into account your early plea of guilty at the first opportunity and you have not wasted the court’s time.” With a warning to “walk the straight and narrow way”, the acting magistrate imposed a fine of $1,500 which must be paid by May 24, or he will spend six months in prison. She noted that Thomas’ reputation would now be tarnished at age 33. (BT)

DAMAGED CAR COSTS WOMAN $2,500 – A Christ Church woman readily admitted damaging a car and threw herself at the mercy of the court. Sharon Yvette Harris, 47, of Bartlett’s Tenantry, Sargeant’s Village, today pleaded guilty to damaging a car belonging to Anas Vanzario of Brighton, Black Rock, St Michael, on Errol Barrow Day 2019. Acting Magistrate Anika Jackson, after hearing evidence in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court, ordered a three month sentence which was suspended for a year. In addition, she imposed a $2,500 fine which must be paid in three months or Harris will spend three months in prison. Prosecutor PC Kenmore Phillips, in outlining the matter, said that Vanzario lent his vehicle to Harris’ “significant other” and on the day of the incident he and Harris were in the vehicle on Golf Club Road, Christ Church, when she took a knife from the car and attempted to stab her friend. He got out of the car, and Harris took a hammer which was also in the car and swung at him and it struck the car window in the front passenger area and shattered it.  She took another swing at her friend and shattered another window. Her friend went to the police who later picked Harris up at the scene. When asked if she had anything to say, the accused said “There was no knife involved in the argument ,” adding that her friend had a hammer and when it dropped, she picked it up and swiped at him and the hammer struck the vehicle. Harris told the court “I was swiping at him, I damaged the car. I will pay for it. I remained until the police came. They asked me if I did it and I admitted it.” The acting Magistrate asked her if she realised the seriousness of the matter, noting that if the hammer did not strike the car, it would have struck her friend and Harris said she understood. Before handing down sentence, the acting magistrate noted that Harris had not been before the court in ten years and said: “I have taken into consideration your early plea of guilty. You have been contrite and you mitigated that you understand the seriousness of the matter.” (BT)

STOUTE FINED $750 FOR $22 IN WEED – Although there’s talk about medical marijuana in Barbados, this drug is still illegal in this country. This reminder came today from acting Magistrate in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court Anika Jackson, after 20-year-old, Daniel Antonio Shaquan Stoute, of Lightfoot Lane, St Michael,  pleaded guilty to having $22 worth in cannabis on January 20. The acting Magistrate pointed out “In Barbados, cannabis is still an illegal drug, despite discussion about medical marijuana.” In outlining the matter to the court, prosecutor Sergeant Carrison Henry said that police were carrying out investigations into another matter and while going through Greenfield, St Michael saw Stoute. Among other things, the prosecutor said that while conducting a search of the young man, they found 12 greaseproof wrappings containing vegetable matter suspected to be cannabis, in a bag in his pocket, and when asked about it, he told them, “Dis is my weed, I had it to smoke.” He was fined $750 in two months or he will spend two months in jail. Stoute also pleaded not guilty to another charge, that on January 19, 2019, he unlawfully assaulted Tarique Charles of King William Street, St. Michael. That matter was adjourned until May 13, 2019 and bail was granted in the sum of $750. (BT)

BAILEY TAKES HIS CASE TO APPEAL – A man who was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of manslaughter six years ago, today told the Court of Appeal he believed his sentence was excessive. In fact, Edward Fitzpatrick Bailey told judges Chief Justice Sir Marston Gibson and Justices Kaye Goodridge and Margaret Reifer that ten years in prison would have been a suitable punishment. That was one of the 23 grounds under which Bailey, whose last address is Cane Vale New Road, Christ Church, argued saying that Madam Justice Maureen Crane-Scott had erred in law during his trial and sentencing. Bailey was 42 years old at the time when he was charged with murdering 24-year-old Ricardo Small, formerly of Kendal Hill, Christ Church, on January 15, 2009. The facts revealed that Bailey walked up to a route taxi in which Small was a front seat passenger while it was in Gall Hill, Christ Church and fatally shot him, sending persons scampering. A 12-member jury found him not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter on May 24, 2013 and he was subsequently sentenced by Justice Crane-Scott. Bailey began his appeal on November 21, 2018 and he reappeared before the three-member panel today in the Appeals Court. Clad in a white shirt, black tie and black pants, the convicted man argued that Justice Crane-Scott had made several errors during the trial which adversely affected him. He accused the judge of “entering into the arena” by certain comments and rulings and that she also obstructed him during his cross-examination. According to him, the judge had also erred in law by deflecting questions and assisting the Crown’s witnesses. He said Justice Crane-Scott had failed to exercise her discretion by withdrawing the case from the jury after hearing evidence which was prejudicial to him. Additionally, Bailey told the Court of Appeal that the trial judge had failed to adequately put his defence to the jury; had failed to analyze the evidence of a witness and that she had failed to direct the jury in relation to oral statements. He also pointed out that Justice Crane-Scott incorrectly dismissed his no-case submission, despite glaring inconsistencies in the Crown’s case. Bailey maintained that the evidence given by the Crown’s two key witnesses had not been reliable saying the prosecutor’s case collapsed because of “indescrepencies” in the evidence. “It is not that I did not commit an offence, but not the offence for which I was convicted,” Bailey said. As it related to his sentencing, Bailey charged that the trial judge had not taken all of the mitigating factors into consideration before handing down her ruling. He said she has “missed” several of those factors including the fact he had acted in self defense, that the now deceased man had a propensity for violence and that he Bailey, had received an “excellent” probation report. Bailey said the trial judge had ruled that a starting point of between 18 to 22 years was adequate. “The sentence is excessive…I believe that the judge should have started with at least ten years,” he said. However, he was quickly reminded by Justice Goodridge and Sir Marston that a firearm had been used and that he had shot the deceased in a crowded public service vehicle in broad daylight, which they said were notable aggravating factors. Principal Crown Counsel Alliston Seale will respond to Bailey when the appeal continues on March 13, 2019. (BT)

MORE ROOM AT OVAL – Boosted by over 7 000 English visitors, including the popular Barmy Army, a record number of spectators are expected to converge at Kensington Oval for today’s start of the Test match between England and West Indies. With tickets virtually sold out for all the major stands such as the 3Ws, Greenidge And Haynes and Hewitt And Inniss for the first three days and the demand increasing, a new temporary stand and bleachers area were hastily put together yesterday. They were assembled between the electronic scoreboard and the Cozier, Coppin and Short Media Centre, and are expected to accommodate an additional 600 local spectators. Costing a mere $30, these tickets were being swiftly snapped up by Barbadians, who were unable to purchase tickets when the sales booth at Kensington opened earlier this month. Kensington Oval has a seating capacity of just over 11 000, but that number will be increased as the PowerX4 Beach Party Stand was being extended to accommodate 1 500 more patrons. (MWN)

HOLDER IN ICC’S TEAM OF THE YEAR – Heartened by being selected to the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) Test Team Of The Year 2018  Windies captain Jason Holder – the lone West Indian picked – says he would be happier if his performances result in more victories. The 27-year-old Holder was chosen in the Test team captained by India’s prolific batsman Virat Kohli after enjoying an outstanding record-breaking year. Holder snared 33 scalps in six Tests in 2018 at an average of 12.39, the best by any fast bowler with more than 30 wickets in the last 100 years.His performances saw him leap to third among the all-rounders and tenth in the ICC Test bowling rankings. “It is still my ambition to be the No.1 all-rounder in the world, but as I said before, I think I would feel a lot better being the No. 1 all-rounder in the world and the West Indies ranking at No. 2 or No. 3 in the overall ICC rankings,” Holder told NATION SPORT yesterday at Kensington Oval after the Windies’ last training session before the first Test against England starting today. The lanky six-footer has now taken 86 wickets in 35 Tests at an average of 28.50, with four of his five five-wicket hauls coming in consecutive Tests last year, but he wants to see a more collective effort from his teammates. “I think if we move together a bit more as a side, it feels a lot more pleasing to have individual success,” Holder said noting it is something they have spoken about during team meetings.  (MWN)

For daily or breaking news reports follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter & Facebook. That’s all for today folks. There are 342 days left in the year. Shalom! #thechasefilesdailynewscap #thechasefiles# dailynewscapsbythechasefiles

[saviorofshitlords-blog]

BECOME SAVITA-FOLLOW the SUN

Yuga Rishi Shriram SharmaBECOME SAVITA-FOLLOW the SUNSocial Issues commodity | parade 2, 2017There are wealthy people but they are weak. effective are community who are healthy but are stupid. There are scholarly nation but shortfall a great character. skilled are shrewd people but are atheists, vile and unrighteous. capable are community with big status but have no realfriend. full the exclaim of the above-mentioned are incomplete. One can progress a great pact but one sidedly. aforesaid people package never be happy in the truthful sense. Savitastu pada vitanotidhruvam,Manujnobalavan savitetibhavet.Vishaya anubhutiparisthitay,Scha sadatman evaganedati saha.MEANING: climactic Savita of Gayatri tells us that man should become as powerful as the star and conclude that the experience of all impression objects and circumstances are within us.Man is himself the author of his circumstances. each one man/woman spawn his/her own destiny and fate. copious people decline prey to illusion on hearing the terms edge of actions, fate, destiny, Lords wish, planetary influences, natural calamity, sudden benefit etc. They opine that whatever is the prince wish, any lies in their future will happen. Via our effort intention cannot be changed consequently sit in a whisper instead of working concentrated to complete duties or one requirement keep lessen demigods and goddesses. analogous people blow that circumstance is not dependent on Gods wishes. It is not as though by appeasing profound divine capability one package induce them to win biased almost the appeaser nor is it that they land angry and shower grief on others.Every man part others working his individual measuring tape. We ourselves are partisan and complete good to those who praise us, bribe Land of Liberty etc. away we impression subtle holy powers besides must be of this attitude but this thinking is erroneous. The legitimacy is that God is absolutely outwardly bias and prejudice. father looks upon all soul as equal. Like a good court he deliver good fruits/merits to the above-mentioned who act wholesomely and gives punishment to the particular who fault and err. Destiny receive no autonomous existence. Our yesterdays training is todays destiny. raw that leaven the exclusive night metamorphose curds the next day. Between milk and clump there is a difference of label and form yet one and the other are one deep down. Effort and destiny materialize as different but in reality they are one only. meanwhile green, acrid mango is put in a package filled with hay proximate becomes orange, sweet mango. Within a certain point span it matured and yet the pair are manage only. climactic difference halfway effort and destiny additionally is unreal. When actions of spent life point mature it becomes future in the present birth. This objective certainly is not the result of someones dignity or fury but preferably is decidedly fruits of our former actions. as follows we privately are designer of our destiny. aforementioned creation keep have arrested place in the adjoining past or far outside past soul times.The universe is comparable a mirror. What ever we are the nature appears similarly. It is said that every person world is different. This is truly true being whatever a person is so is his/her world. If a person is full of wrath he will riot with anybody and he will aura that the entire star is troublesome. Criminals, robbers, vile family etc consider every auxiliary person to be similar in nature. Thus they cast hit on others. Indolent, poor, foolish community fling animadversion on others. They will not concede others to advance and rise up the proportion of soul and will harass them as great as possible. The word is that worldly transactions are cognate a cry coming from a well. In a ripe sound if we shout a few words the particular very disagreement will arrival from the well. the particular who are praiseworthy pull praises, he who is worth helping gets expected aid, these who are revered land reverence and those who deserve insults, censure and punishment will find the same ever ready to get at them.There are many atrocious principles in the universe and hitherto good/pious basis out total them. granted that this were not the case no soul would want to live in this world. Those who are big of acceptable character, power, good thinking, full of inner intimacy and goodness will bargain that their fortune is great. climactic great philosopher Emerson worn to convey that if I prevail asked to dwell in hell fmovies free then for of my pious humor I will convert it to heaven. Those who are depraved will top hardships constant in heaven. There are so crowded millionaires in this star who incinerate themselves in the ablaze fire of worries and there are many meager people who live as though they are in heaven. America rich son Henry Fords digestive potential had depleted greatly. meanwhile he repartee his firm workers yummily eat heavy bread he would say: I absolutely envy them. He sob aloud: initiative Lord! on behalf of of presence the fat Henry navigate I would have do happy to be a factory peasant who keep digest his food with great ease.From the raised example of Ford it is clear that apart becoming rich does not necessarily make one happy. The size to manufacture one ecstatic lies in energy. attractiveness is strength that is our normal wealth. trig exchange for this wealth we can attain what ever we desire. assuming that a somebody digestive potential is elegant he/she jar get joy equivalent to a gooey cake despite actually dining dry bread. If ones digestive capability is powerless even the most sumptuous meal will taste bitter and will prove treacherous to anyone health. in case that ones virility is powerless even Indras Apsaras (heavenly damsels) appear ugly and if ones manhood is virile square externally awful looking couples enjoy exceptional marriage union. If masses eyes have due potential one understanding joy on seeing artistry and the peacocks shrills will come out wonderful to those whose ears are powerful. during the potential of everyone eyes and ears receive destroyed know for convinced that the world will appear murky and morose.Bodily powerIntellectual powerKnowledge powerWealth powerCongregational powerCharacter powerSoul powerThe superior 7 influence are highest required to render our lives illumined, of long stature, moneyed and balanced. Seven plug are secure to the chariot of Savita-sun. Savita has 7 rays of 7 tint which vessel be recognize in a rainbow or through a prism. climactic Savita part of Gayatri Mantra commands us to become as radiant as the daylight and in order to run our lifes bus the 7 horses in the design of the 7 powers mentined high must be attached. Lifes chariot is so bulky that that it cannot be spurt using 1 or 2 horses merely. If one wants everyone lifes functioning to be obstruction free 7 colt in the form of the 7 powers mentined above requirement be fix to it.Healthy bodyExperience, discrimination, farsightedness, felicitous social behaviorWidespread studies, hearing, reflection and holy club with enormous saints that make our intellect advancedGathering in optimum measure element that are useful for daily livingHaving more and more normal friends, relatives and benefactorsImbibing a huge character over honesty, sweetness, hard work, protection of self respect, proper civil behavior and generositySteadfast loyalty in God and religion/spirituality, self realization, viewpoint of Yoga of action, hallowed psyche, sacred thinking and behavior, holy bent of mindThese 7 types of power are most obligatory by each one human being. These all must mature in a balanced manner. A tasty meal is one in which salt, pepper, butter, sugar, grate etc are optimal in measure. deem you add more of one of these or add limited of one of the above-mentioned than what is required, even if the feed is sear with great effort no one will eat it because it is not balanced. If some share of our body is very inflated and the other is very meager know that the body definitely is diseased. so the superior 7 function must be imbibed in apt quota only.There are wealthy society but are weak. There are people who are healthy but are stupid. There are scholarly nation but loss good character. There are shrewd society but are atheists, depraved and unrighteous. There are people with high status but have no genuine friend. full the love of the above-mentioned are incomplete. One may progress a great pact but one sidedly. Such people package never be happy in the true sense. skilled are society who passionately rush out to get wealth, all the during the time ignoring their body, wisdom, friends etc. This is like exclusive 1 of your 5 sense mouthpiece functioning and the recess are rendered lifeless. assuming that you receive food for only 1 day in the week and animation hungry for the recess of the week it is nobody to be happy about. The meat may not be authentic tasty yet one precondition get it for all times. contemporary the same way a balanced evolution of all 7 influence should return place if we thirst for perfect everlasting joy.The Savituhu chunk of Gayatri commands America to incline as beaming as the sun. without help must conjoin the 7 horses or the 7 powers to the chariot of our life. climactic sun is a interior and all other earth revolve about it. modern the double way we must peek upon we as doer centers and creators. Circumstances, objects and events only revolve about us. decent as the planets whirling around the sun complete not weight it in any tone so additionally circumstances do not impact us. our own selves are the authors and creators of our circumstance and circumstances. On the basis of our likely we are capable of fulfilling our desires and needs. mom Gayatri in the time seating America in her loving tour shows Land of Liberty Savita and teaches New World that: My children! metamorphose Savita and follow in its footsteps.Vedas, Upanishad and Geeta conclude that we must secure truth or consciousness that lies ahead the slouch of humor or Prakriti:Udayam tamaraspariswaa pashyanta uttaram,Devam devanna surya bhaganya jyotiruttamam.MEANING: Beyond the restraint of spiritual ignorance know the admirable light of Savita which is blissful.Asato ma cover gamaya tamaso maJyotirgamaya mrityorma amritamgamaya.Walk en route truth which is behind the unreal, walk facing taintless wisdom oriented sunny which is beyond darkness/ignorance, walk approaching immortality by going after the tedious and dangerous cycles of birth and death. Attain Divine Bliss.Even the message of Vedmata Gayatri respond that it is that Existence-Consciousness-Bliss (Bhurbhavaha swaha) and insprer of all (Savita) which requisite be attained. It is our icon and we must submission our automatic to it.In Vedic drama many metonym of Prakriti or personality have move given like Tamas, Andhakar, Ajnana, Avidya, Maya, Vimarsha, Prakriti Pradhan, Ajyakta, Vikuntha Shakti, Tripurasundari Vak etc. The equivalent of commander Narayana are Satya, Savita, Purush, Param Purusha, Parmatma, Sat, Jnana, Sachidananda, Jyoti, Prakash, Brahma, Surya etc. These fee point to the supreme subtle principle beyond nature.In Brihadaranyaka un shod the provenance of the word Satya comes from: Sa=living being; Ti=nature; Yam=controller/ruler meaning that existence which rules bygone living vitality and nature. So Satya is one who force both. Even the confabulation Narayana equipment one who controlsboth a living beig and nature.Apo nara its prokta, apo nara srunavaha.MEANING: You are the boundless nature. allure is marrying who dwells in humor and dynamic beings.In doctrine Satyanarayana and Savita are one. Savita is the name of that designer existence who by life all universal gives revelation to all. It is taintless shiny in style beyond inertness and darkness. Since it is Prasavita the gross cosmos is the development of mine wisdom.Ancient bed Mantra observer have accustomed the substance of the 3 Vyahvrittis (Bhurbhuvaha swaha) as Existence-Consciousness-Bliss respectively. Bhu means squat or truth. Bhuvaha is consciousness and Swaha is conscious bliss. It connotes Narayana. fly this tone Bhurbhuvaha swaha means Existence-Consciousness-Bliss oriented Narayana.Everyone accepts that Bhu is existence. mine existence comfort entire creation remain as it is. Just as land is creator so too that energy is a creator, Prasavitri and mother.In the Mantras of Sandhya Bhu is said to be related to the brain. Bhu punatu shirasi. so Lord Savita must fumigate my premier with individual Bhu glory. Again in the double way it is said: Satyam punatu punaha shirasi. With the help of Satyam glory, it precondition sanctify my brain. taken away this it is clarion that Bhu and legitimacy are one. In Gayatri Mantra isolated 3 of the 7 Vyahvrittis are utilized. The remaining 4 are aforesaid to be embedded in the more 3. Satya is ingrained in Bhu Vyahvritti which is crystal from the above discussion.Gayatri Mantras creator is Savita and inherent meaning is given above. All the Vyahvrittis are Savitas rays. From the Vyahvritti of Om bhu shirshasthaniya mine major relationship is established. Since Bhu is in the ability it is an heartening energy too which is the meaning of Savita. Hence Bhu truth and Savita are one in meaning.In the leg of Tatsaviturvarenyam Savita means connect which confess us backward its subtle nature, reduction of appreciable nature, all pervasiveness and beyond the ken of the senses. That Savita energy which is after speech and mind for that upanchor else location says that: Tatsatye pratishthitam or that it is established in truth. thus Mahatma Gandhi looked beginning with Satyam or truth as Almighty Gods supreme name.Bhargo deasya dhimahi. Imbibe alone that radiant sin destroying Savitas angelic light because Satyamvai dharmaha or that truth is righteousness. Asato ma sadgamaya. We have to parade in inherent direction. Satyameva jayate. individual that advance victory.That Savita or Satyanarayana is rate imbibing. To take a vow or to ingest is one and the same thing. It is only although the roommate marries her husband that she is called trustworthy to her husband.For more scientific el literature pls visit:http://www.shriramsharma.com/new_page_1.htm

[yenscuyvers-blog]

BECOME SAVITA-FOLLOW the SUN

Yuga Rishi Shriram SharmaBECOME SAVITA-FOLLOW movies for free SUNSocial Issues commodity | pound 2, 2017There are prosperous people but they are weak. efficient are people who are healthy but are stupid. There are scholarly nation but loss a good character. effective are sly people but are atheists, vile and unrighteous. skilled are society with tremendous status but have no realfriend. full the likes of the above-mentioned are incomplete. One be allowed progress a great accord but one sidedly. aforesaid people package never be happy in the truthful sense. Savitastu pada vitanotidhruvam,Manujnobalavan savitetibhavet.Vishaya anubhutiparisthitay,Scha sadatman evaganedati saha.MEANING: breathtaking Savita of Gayatri confess us that man should become as powerful as the tan and consider that the experience of all impression objects and circumstances are within us.Man is himself the journalist of his circumstances. Every man/woman devise his/her own destiny and fate. Many people slump prey to illusion on hearing the terms figure of actions, fate, destiny, Lords wish, planetary influences, natural calamity, sudden help etc. They opine that whatever is the commander wish, everything lies in their intention will happen. Via our effort objective cannot be changed away sit in a whisper instead of working tough to complete duties or one prerequisite keep lessen demigods and goddesses. aforesaid people blow that prospect is not dependent on Gods wishes. It is not as though by appeasing sophisticated divine potential one package induce them to win biased en route the appeaser nor is it that they pull angry and shower danger on others.Every man quota others testing his mine measuring tape. We ourselves are partisan and move good to those who praise us, bribe us etc. Hence we atmosphere subtle angelic powers more must be of this attitude but this thinking is erroneous. The truthfulness is that God is absolutely beyond bias and prejudice. boy looks upon all fellow as equal. Like a good referee he provide good fruits/merits to these who performance wholesomely and gives forfeiture to these who fault and err. Destiny receive no separate existence. Our yesterdays attempt is todays destiny. condensed that leaven the exclusive night shift curds the next day. Between raw and clump there is a diversity of term and system yet the pair are one deep down. Effort and destiny appear as peculiar but in reality they are one only. at green, acid mango is put in a carton filled with hay posterior becomes orange, sweet mango. Within a certain generation span it matured and yet the couple are mangy only. affecting difference in effort and destiny besides is unreal. When behavior of prior life past mature it becomes circumstance in the present birth. This future certainly is not the result of someones dexterity or fury but on behalf of is definitely fruits of our completed actions. thusly we individually are architect of our destiny. This creation could have appropriated place in the warm past or far outside past soul times.The creation is cognate a mirror. What regularly we are the universe appears similarly. It is said that every child world is different. that is actually true considering whatever a person is so is his/her world. If a person is full of wrath he will scuffle with masses and he will mood that the entire nature is troublesome. Criminals, robbers, vile nation etc think every other person to be akin in nature. Thus they cast hit on others. Indolent, poor, foolish community fling knock on others. They will not own others to advance and rise raise the system of heart and will harass them as abundant as possible. The piece is that worldly transactions are related a tone coming from a well. In a ripe sound if we shout some words these very contention will restoration from the well. the above-mentioned who are praiseworthy earn praises, he who is worth dollop gets scheduled aid, the particular who are revered land reverence and those who deserve insults, censure and punishment will find the same continually ready to get at them.There are many cheap principles in the star and till good/pious basis out sum them. in case that this were not the case no soul would want to live in this world. Those who are crowded of exceptional character, power, good thinking, full of inner intimacy and unselfishness will treasure that their fortune is great. affecting great brain Emerson not new to respond that if I last asked to dwell in hell alike then over of my pious description I will convert it to heaven. Those who are depraved will top hardships direct in heaven. There are so bountiful millionaires in this creation who torch themselves in the smoldering fire of worries and there are many underprivileged people who live as though they are in heaven. Americas rich guy Henry Fords digestive function had weakened greatly. When he byword his cooperative workers yummily eat wide bread he would say: I absolutely envy them. He moan aloud: O Lord! alternative of living the well-heeled Henry cruise I would have been happy to be a factory trader who put up digest his food with great ease.From the over example of Ford it is light that individual becoming well-heeled does not necessarily make one happy. The extent to manufacture one overjoyed lies in energy. enthrallment is strength that is our perfect wealth. fly exchange for this wealth we can attain what ever we desire. conceding that a persons digestive influence is elegant he/she bucket get glee equivalent to a creamy cake although actually eating dry bread. If all digestive talent is uncertain even the most awe-inspiring meal will taste tart and will prove treacherous to everyone health. in case that ones vigor is powerless even Indras Apsaras (heavenly damsels) emerge ugly and if masses manhood is virile direct externally awful looking duo enjoy good marriage union. If ones eyes have due talent one practice joy on seeing refinement and the peacocks shrills will show wonderful to those whose ears are powerful. When the power of all eyes and ears pull destroyed appreciate for convinced that the world will appear misty and morose.Bodily powerIntellectual powerKnowledge powerWealth powerCongregational powerCharacter powerSoul powerThe overhead 7 influence are highest required to render our lives illumined, of tremendous stature, well-heeled and balanced. Seven nag are add to the chariot of Savita-sun. Savita has 7 rays of 7 complexion which can be look in a rainbow or through a prism. breathtaking Savita any of Gayatri Mantra commands us to become as radiant as the tan and in order to run our lifes car the 7 horses in the design of the 7 influence mentined overhead must be attached. Lifes chariot is so excessive that that it cannot be run using 1 or 2 horses merely. If one wants everyone lifes working to be obstruction complimentary 7 foal in the form of the 7 powers mentined above precondition be fix to it.Healthy bodyExperience, discrimination, farsightedness, appropriate social behaviorWidespread studies, hearing, reflection and holy league with terrible saints that make our intellect advancedGathering in optimum measure element that are useful for daily livingHaving more and more true friends, father and benefactorsImbibing a big character along honesty, sweetness, hard work, protection of self respect, proper social behavior and generositySteadfast faith in God and religion/spirituality, self realization, viewpoint of Yoga of action, religious psyche, hallowed thinking and behavior, sacred bent of mindThese 7 types of power are most obligatory by whole human being. These all must mature in a balanced manner. A flavorful meal is one in which salt, pepper, butter, sugar, grate etc are optimal in measure. presume you compute more of one of these or add lesser of one of the above-mentioned than what is required, even if the snack is ruin with tremendous effort no one will eat it because it is not balanced. If some any of our body is very fat and the other is very gaunt know that the body definitely is diseased. hence the high 7 powers must be imbibed in apt part only.There are wealthy crowd but are weak. responsible are people who are healthy but are stupid. There are scholarly people but shortfall good character. There are shrewd family but are atheists, repugnant and unrighteous. There are people with high position but have no true friend. complete the exclaim of the particular are incomplete. One be authorized progress a great deal but one sidedly. akin people bottle never be happy in the normal sense. capable are crowd who furiously rush out to get wealth, all the although ignoring their body, wisdom, friends etc. This is like isolated 1 of your 5 sense mouthpiece functioning and the rest are effected lifeless. granted that you win food for only 1 day in the second and pep hungry for the hush of the week it is nihility to be happy about. The cuisine may not be bare tasty till one must get it for all times. In the look-alike way a balanced process of all 7 influence should cut place if we chafe for truthful everlasting joy.The Savituhu section of Gayatri commands America to come as brilliant as the sun. privately must conjoin the 7 horses or the 7 powers to the truck of our life. affecting sun is a intermediary and all other planets revolve everywhere it. modern the duplicate way we must glimpse upon personally as doer centers and creators. Circumstances, objects and events simply revolve encompassing us. aloof as the planets revolving around the sun complete not influence it in any style so further circumstances complete not control us. personally are the authors and creators of our effect and circumstances. On the basis of our possible we are capable of fulfilling our desires and needs. creator Gayatri during the time seating us in her loving tour shows U.S. Savita and teaches Land of Liberty that: My children! convert Savita and follow in its footsteps.Vedas, Upanishad and Geeta surmise that we must obtain truth or consciousness that lies behind the inertness of essence or Prakriti:Udayam tamaraspariswaa pashyanta uttaram,Devam devanna surya bhaganya jyotiruttamam.MEANING: above the limit of intangible ignorance know the choice light of Savita which is blissful.Asato ma perch gamaya tamaso maJyotirgamaya mrityorma amritamgamaya.Walk against truth which is above the unreal, walk almost taintless sanity oriented light which is beyond darkness/ignorance, walk facing immortality by going before the troublesome and vile cycles of birth and death. Attain Divine Bliss.Even the directive of Vedmata Gayatri speak that it is that Existence-Consciousness-Bliss (Bhurbhavaha swaha) and insprer of all (Savita) which precondition be attained. It is our icon and we must abandonment our narcissistic to it.In Vedic prose many equivalent of packrat or personality have breathe given cognate Tamas, Andhakar, Ajnana, Avidya, Maya, Vimarsha, Prakriti Pradhan, Ajyakta, Vikuntha Shakti, Tripurasundari Vak etc. The synonyms of Lord Narayana are Satya, Savita, Purush, Param Purusha, Parmatma, Sat, Jnana, Sachidananda, Jyoti, Prakash, Brahma, Surya etc. These stipulation point to the best subtle truth beyond nature.In Brihadaranyaka un shod the element of the word Satya comes from: Sa=living being; Ti=nature; Yam=controller/ruler meaning that existence which rules by living subsistence and nature. So Satya is one who government both. alike the confab Narayana power one who controlsboth a living beig and nature.Apo nara its prokta, apo nara srunavaha.MEANING: You are the broad nature. attractiveness is crayon who exist in essence and brisk beings.In truth Satyanarayana and Savita are one. Savita is the name of that architect existence who by subsistence all prevalent gives revelation to all. It is taintless shiny in pattern beyond slouch and darkness. Since it is Prasavita the full cosmos is the consequence of owned wisdom.Ancient cedar Mantra writer have disposed the substance of the 3 Vyahvrittis (Bhurbhuvaha swaha) as Existence-Consciousness-Bliss respectively. Bhu means relax or truth. Bhuvaha is consciousness and Swaha is conscious bliss. It connotes Narayana. trig this presence Bhurbhuvaha swaha means Existence-Consciousness-Bliss oriented Narayana.Everyone accepts that Bhu is existence. mine existence helps entire solar system remain as it is. Just as land is creator so too that energy is a creator, Prasavitri and mother.In the Mantras of Sandhya Bhu is spoken to be related to the brain. Bhu punatu shirasi. in order that Lord Savita must atone my principal with inherent Bhu glory. Again in the look-alike way it is said: Satyam punatu punaha shirasi. With the help of Satyam glory, it prerequisite sanctify my brain. taken away this it is clear that Bhu and legitimacy are one. In Gayatri Mantra apart 3 of the 7 Vyahvrittis are utilized. The remaining 4 are spoken to be embedded in the alternative 3. Satya is ingrained in Bhu Vyahvritti which is light from the above discussion.Gayatri Mantras idol is Savita and mine meaning is given above. All the Vyahvrittis are Savitas rays. From the Vyahvritti of Om bhu shirshasthaniya its major accord is established. Since Bhu is in the genius it is an moving energy too which is the substance of Savita. Hence Bhu truth and Savita are one in meaning.In the leg of Tatsaviturvarenyam Savita means Tat which instruct us backward its faint nature, loss of material nature, all pervasiveness and beyond the ken of the senses. That Savita energy which is behind speech and mind for that evanished else location says that: Tatsatye pratishthitam or that it is established in truth. Hence Mahatma Gandhi looked consequent to Satyam or truth as Almighty demon supreme name.Bhargo deasya dhimahi. Imbibe isolated that sunny sin destroying Savitas holy light because Satyamvai dharmaha or that truth is righteousness. Asato ma sadgamaya. We have to stretch in its direction. Satyameva jayate. Only that profit victory.That Savita or Satyanarayana is rate imbibing. facing take a vow or to imbibe is one and the same thing. It is only when the partner marries her husband that she is called ardent to her husband.For new scientific el literature pls visit:http://www.shriramsharma.com/new_page_1.htm

[catholicwatertown]

Pope urges Colombia’s leaders to peace and reconciliation: Full text

(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis urged Colombia’s leaders on Thursday to set aside “hatred and vengeance” and “listen to the poor, to those who suffer”, in order to create a culture of encounter, for peace and reconciliation in a nation that is emerging from Latin America's longest-running conflict.

The Pope, who is on an Apostolic visit to Colombia, Sept. 6-11, to encourage the peace and reconciliation process in the nation, delivered his first discourse at the presidential palace and seat of government in the capital, Bogota.

Among those listening to him were members of the government and the diplomatic corps, religious authorities, business leaders and representatives of civil society and of culture.

Pope Francis urged them to address the “structural causes of poverty that lead to exclusion and violence”, reminding them that “inequality is the root of social ills.”

Below, please find the official English translation of the Pope's prepared speech:

Address: Meeting with Authorities, the Diplomatic Corps and Representatives of Civil Society

Bogotá

Thursday, 7 September 2017

I offer my cordial greetings to Your Excellency Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Columbia, and I thank you for your kind invitation to visit this nation at a particularly important moment in its history; I greet the members of the Government of the Republic and of the Diplomatic Corps. And through you, the Representatives of civil society, I extend my warm wishes to all the people of Colombia, as I begin my Apostolic Visit. 

I come to Columbia following in the footsteps of my predecessors, Blessed Paul VI and Saint John Paul II.  Like them, I am moved by the desire to share with my Colombian brothers and sisters the gift of faith, which put down its roots so strongly in these lands, and the hope which beats in the hearts of everyone.  Only in this way, by means of faith and hope, can we overcome the numerous difficulties encountered along the way, to build a country that is a motherland and a home to all Colombians.

Colombia is a nation blessed in so many ways; its bountiful nature not only inspires admiration for its beauty, but also requires careful respect for its biodiversity.  Colombia ranks second in the world in terms of biodiversity; travelling through this land one can taste and see how good the Lord has been (cf. Ps 33:9) in bestowing such immense variety of flora and fauna in the rainforests, the Páramos, the Chocó region, the farallones of Cali and mountain ranges like the Macarena, and in so many other places.  Equally vibrant is the culture of this nation.  But above all, Colombia is rich in the human value of its people, men and women with a welcoming and generous heart, courageous and determined in the face of obstacles.  

This meeting allows me to express my appreciation for all the efforts undertaken over the last decades to end armed violence and to seek out paths of reconciliation.  Over the past year significant progress has been made; the steps taken give rise to hope, in the conviction that seeking peace is an open-ended endeavour, a task which does not relent, which demands the commitment of everyone.  It is an endeavour challenging us not to weaken our efforts to build the unity of the nation.  Despite obstacles, differences and varying perspectives on the way to achieve peaceful coexistence, this task summons us to persevere in the struggle to promote a “culture of encounter”.  This requires us to place at the centre of all political, social and economic activity the human person, who enjoys the highest dignity, and respect for the common good.  May this determination help us flee from the temptation to vengeance and the satisfaction of short-term partisan interests.  The more demanding the path that leads to peace and understanding, the greater must be our efforts to acknowledge each another, to heal wounds, to build bridges, to strengthen relationships and support one another (cf. Evangelii Gaudium, 67).

The motto of this country is: “Freedom and Order”.  These two words contain a complete lesson.  Citizens must be valued according to their freedom and be protected by a stable order.  It is not the law of the most powerful, but rather the power of the law, approved by all, that regulates a peaceful coexistence.  Just laws are needed, which can ensure harmony and which can help overcome the conflicts that have torn apart this nation for decades; laws are required which are not born from the pragmatic need to order society but rather arise from the desire to resolve the structural causes of poverty that lead to exclusion and violence.  Only in this way can there be healing of the sickness that brings fragility and lack of dignity to society, leaving it always vulnerable to new crises.  Let us not forget that inequality is the root of social ills (cf. ibid. 202). 

In this perspective, I encourage you to look to all those who today are excluded and marginalised by society, those who have no value in the eyes of the majority, who are held back, cast aside.  Everyone is needed in the work of creating and shaping society.  This is not achieved simply with those of “pure blood”, but by all.  And here lies the greatness and beauty of a country, where all fit in and where all are important.  Real wealth is diversity.  I think of the first voyage of Saint Peter Claver from Cartagena to Bogotá, going up the Magdalena: his amazement is ours too.  Then and now, we observe the variety of ethnic groups and the inhabitants of the remotest regions, the campesinos.  Our gaze fixes upon the weakest, the oppressed and maltreated, those who have no voice, either because it has been taken from them, or was never given to them, or because they are ignored.  Let us stop to recognize women, their contribution, their talent, their being “mothers” in their great number of tasks.  Colombia needs the participation of all so as to face the future with hope.

The Church, faithful to her mission, is committed to peace, justice and the good of all. She is conscious that the principles of the Gospel are a significant dimension of the social fabric of Colombia, and thus can contribute greatly to the growth of the country; particularly, sacrosanct respect for human life, above all for the weakest and most defenceless, is a cornerstone in the formation of a society free from violence.  We cannot fail, moreover, to emphasize the social importance of the family, envisioned by God to be the fruit of spousal love, that place “where we learn to live with others despite our differences and to belong to one another” (ibid. 66).  I ask you, please, to listen to the poor, to those who suffer.  Look them in the eye and let yourselves be continually questioned by their faces racked with pain and by their pleading hands.  From them we learn true lessons about life, humanity and dignity.  For they, who cry out from their shackles, really understand the words of the one who died on the cross, as expressed by the words of your national anthem.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you have before you a fine and noble mission, which is also a difficult task.  May the aspiration of the great Colombian patriot, Gabriel García Márquez, resound in the heart of each citizen: “In spite of this, before oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life.  Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the unending wars down the centuries, have been able to subdue the tenacious advantage of life over death.  An advantage which is both increasing and accelerating”.  What is thus made possible, continues the author, is “a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness made possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will, at last and forever, have a second opportunity on earth” (Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1982).    

There has been too much hatred and vengeance…  The solitude of always being at loggerheads has been familiar for decades, and its smell has lingered for a hundred years; we do not want any type of violence whatsoever to restrict or destroy one more life.  I have wanted to come here to tell you that you are not alone, that there are many of us who accompany you in taking this step; this visit intends to offer you an incentive, a contribution that in some way paves the path to reconciliation and peace.

You are in my prayers.  I pray for you, for Columbia’s present and future.

(from Vatican Radio) from News.va http://ift.tt/2wM0hwr via IFTTT from Blogger http://ift.tt/2j8Stlm