Fulton Sheen was a legend. He was an American bishop (later archbishop) of the Catholic Church known for his preaching and especially his work on television and radio. He has a favorite quote I have on my FaceBook “About Me” page:
“…Because so few are thinking, naturally there are found but a few to argue. Prejudice there is in abundance and sentiment too, for these are things born of enthusiasm without the pain of labor. Thinking on the contrary, is a difficult task; it is the hardest work man can do-that is perhaps why so few indulge in it. Thought-saving devices have been invented that rival labor-saving devices in their ingenuity. Fine sounding phrases like ‘Life is bigger than logic,’ or ‘Progress is the spirit of the age,’ go rattling by us like express trains, carrying with them the burden of those who are too lazy to think for themselves. Not even philosophers argue today; they only explain away. At best, both sides may shoot off firecrackers, creating the illusion of conflict, but it is only a sham battle in which there are no casualties; there are plenty of explosions, but never an exploded argument.”
Here he speaks about Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky:
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen speaks to the identity crisis in mankind:
U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies
KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.
“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”
Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records….
This has been a burning topic in my mind for quite some time. The reason being is that while Bush was President I was told all the time (by the Left) about his apparent connections to Wahhabism via Saudi Arabia… and how we shouldn’t support a President who has these ties. The Ground Zero mosque Imam said he would take funds from any country, and now he is a hero of the Left. Odd. This Imam has already accepted money from known terrorist funding conspirators and I am sure as the money trail is followed, more will come to light. A great article on Front Page Magazine stirs this up again in me. I will post some ideas to maybe get this topic stirred in your mind as well. Could you imagine though, if the Catholic Church executed homosexuals in 5 or 6 countries and then they wanted to build a catholic college on the site where Matthew Shepard was killed. WOW! The outcry from the Left would be deafening.
In September 2007, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stood before an audience of college students and faculty at Columbia University and made the perverse claim that there were no homosexuals in Iran. ”In Iran we do not have this phenomenon, I don’t know who has told you that we have it,” he said. Ahmadinejad’s comments, made in a year in which Iran had executed 200 people, homosexuals among them, made shock waves around the globe. Yet the absurdity of the official denial may also have been unintentionally salutary, spotlighting as it did the terrible plight of homosexuals in the Islamic Republic.
There is a good reason that Iran’s theocratic dictatorship denies the existence of gays inside the country. An honest acknowledgment of reality would force the authorities to acknowledge that Iranian gays are regularly marginalized, harassed, tortured, and executed. Sometimes, they are forced into gender-altering operations. Ahmadinejad’s claim also called attention to the hypocrisy of the international community on the issue of gay rights in Iran. President Ahmadinejad’s absurd claim received overwhelming disapproval, yet when Iranian homosexuals are routinely abused and lawfully executed simply for their sexual preferences, that same international community, and the “progressive” Left that claims to champion gay rights, are deafeningly silent….
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….As the progressive backlash against Prop 8 indicates, gay rights are a significant and sensitive issue for Americans, particularly on the Left. But despite passionate outbreaks by the gay community and others, Americans have been uncharacteristically uninterested in the brutal treatment of homosexuals in Iran. These advocates ardently insist that homosexuals have the right to wed, to raise children, and to live as others do, yet they turn a blind eye to the execution of gays in Iran simply for their sexual orientation.
Such executions are in fact enshrined in Iranian law, where homosexuality is punishable the death penalty. Human rights groups estimate that almost 4,000 gays have been executed since 1979, when the Islamic regime took power. Gays are arrested, beaten, tortured, and in most cases, hanged or even stoned.
Sharia, or Islamic law, the legal code applied in Iran, prohibits any type of sexual activity outside the realm of heterosexual marriage. No distinction is made between consensual and non-consensual relations nor between sexual activities conducted in private or public. Any sexual relations other than the traditional marriage between a man and woman—referring to sodomy or adultery, as we’ve recently seen in the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the woman sentenced to stoning for allegedly having an extra-marital affair—is punishable by death….
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….older males experimenting with younger males has been a part of Islamic societies for centuries as a way to ease sexual temptation in a segregated society that condemns pre-marital sex. Celebrated Iranian poets have often referred to the love between men and young boys in century-old poetry.
Iran is currently one of five Muslim countries to apply capital punishment to homosexuals along with Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, Sudan, and Yemen, according to the 2010 International Lesbian Gay Association’s World Legal Survey. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan also applied the death penalty, as did Sadaam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. After the collapse of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan began punishing homosexuality with fines and imprisonment. In Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Islamist militia followed the Taliban’s lead, attacking, torturing and murdering hundreds of gay men in “honor killings.”
Under the rule of the late Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, homosexuality was accepted to the extent that there was often news coverage of same-sex wedding c ceremonies. Gay rights were a popular item, and there were even some nightclubs that specifically catered to homosexual patrons. According to Janet Afary, professor of global religion and modernity at the University of California Santa Barbara, one of the critiques made about the Shah’s government, eventually leading up to the Revolution of 1979, was that it was excessively liberal on moral issues, such as homosexuality….
You would think that the Progressive Left would be supportive of regime change in theocratic societies that cause such discriminatory [deadly] practices against homosexuals. But they typically do not. Many were for the student uprising in Iran, but their support was typically for the Marxist movement within the Islamic faith. So I see this as more of a support for one view of Utopian versus another view. BUt both views are Utopian, and this may explain the support it engenders from the Left.
Warning: the content of the linked documentary is graphic and disturbing.
The example of a university about 20-minutes away from me should be mind-numbing for the common sense person. You will see what I am talking in this August 15th, 2005 article by Dr. Reisman where she intimates the Left’s love affair in pederasty (bringing it a bit closer than Afghanistan):
Academics need money and have respectability. Pedophiles and pornographers need respectability and have money. The relationship between academic institutions and pornographers and pedophiles, which began with Playboy’s funding the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, continues today at CSUN. The following example demonstrates the link between pornographers and academia.
In August 1998, CSUN used its state-supported offices to organize a “World Pornography Conference.” Led by former Kinsey Institute researcher James E. Elias, pornography industry leaders and performers met with “academics” to discuss and shape national pornography and pedophile strategies to be implemented in schoolrooms, newsrooms, bedrooms and courtrooms.
James Elias, CSUN’s Sex Research Director received his doctorate from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality of which Wardell Pomeroy was the former Academic Dean. As noted in Kentucky v. Happy Day (1980), Wardell Pomeroy was a Kinsey co-author and sex partner who publicly sought funds from the pornography industry to produce child pornography (Jones, 1997).
The conference featured Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia editor Vern Bullough and his pedophile editorial colleagues: John DeCecco, Daniel Tsang and Wayne Dynes — all professors at major American colleges.3 Chairing the CSUN “Erotic” section on “Child Pornography” was Harris Mirkin, an associate professor of political science at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Mirkin’s 1999 article, “The Pattern of Sexual Politics: Feminism, Homosexuality and Pedophilia” (Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 37) describes the steps pedophiles need to take to gain social acceptance. He advises pedophiles to advocate for the elimination of words like “child molestation” and “child abuse.”
Ralph Underwager was a featured speaker during the section on child pornography. Underwager is a psychologist and theologian who frequently testifies as a defense expert in child sexual abuse cases. In 1993, Underwager and his wife, Hollida Wakefield, were featured in an interview in Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia (Winter 1993, p.3). In his interview, Underwager stated: “Pedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose. They can say that what they want is the best way to love…” Conference speaker Ted McIlvenna, founder of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, contributed an article in December 1977 to Hustler magazine 4 in which he urged legalization of incest and adult-child sex.
Is there a history of the New Left and this wanting of Islamo-Nazi type regimes that denigrate women and lift rape of young men to new levels? We read just a bit from David Horowitz’s intro of his book, Unholy Alliance:
A further irony of these complaints was that the shah had been, in fact, a modernizer who promoted education and the equality of women. His social progressivism was the very cause of the Islamic revolution that overthrew him. President Jimmy Carter’s liberal aversion to the shah’s authoritarian rule helped to undermine his regime and pave the way for the reign of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic revolution. While American radicals welcomed the revolution of the ayatollahs, their regime was far more reactionary and repressive than the government of the shah, and it both created and inspired the Islamic radicals who confront America as enemies today.
Why has the American Left made alliances of convenience with Islamic radicals who have declared war on the democratic West and whose own values are reactionary and oppressive? Why have American radicals actively obstructed the War on Terror, thereby undermining the defense of the democracies of the West? Why have liberals opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom, whose goals are the overthrow of tyranny and the establishment of political democracy and human rights—agendas that coincide with their own? Why have Democrats turned against the policy of regime change, which they had supported during the Clinton administration in both Kosovo and Iraq? Why has the Democratic Party declared political war on the president’s war and thus made foreign policy a point of partisan conflict for the first time since the end of World War II? What does this fracture of the American consensus mean for the future of America’s War on Terror?
These are the questions the current inquiry seeks to address. In doing so, it necessarily must confront others: What is the nature of the American Left? How does it think about the world? How did it come to ally itself with Islamic jihad? How significant is the threat posed by its opposition to the War on Terror? How powerful is its presence in the Democratic Party? What is its role in shaping the American future?
These are great questions. I think the book that answers them more fully in a short and concise manner can be found in the chapter entitled “The Red-Black-Green Islamic Axis,” in the book by Melanie Phillips — The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power. While my small quote from Melanie does not do her thesis justice, it is a key connecting point in my minds eye:
These curious coalitions are frequently explained as merely opportunistic alliances, where certain groups make common cause with ideological opponents in pursuit of the shared aim of bringing down Western society. This explanation surely is only partly correct. What these various movements have in common goes much deeper: they are all utopian. Each in its own way wants to bring about the perfect society, to create a new man and a new world.
Each therefore thinks of itself as progressive; the supporters of each believe themselves to be warriors in the most noble of causes. The greens believe they will save the planet. The leftists believe they will create the brotherhood of man. The fascists believe they will purge mankind of corruption. And the Islamists believe they will create the Kingdom of God on earth.
What they all have in common, therefore, is a totalitarian mindset in pursuit of the creation of their alternative reality. These are all worldviews that can accommodate no deviation and must therefore be imposed by coercion. Because their end product is a state of perfection, nothing can be allowed to stand in its way. This is itself a projected pathology. As Eric Hoffer suggested in The True Believer, the individual involved in a mass movement is in some way acutely alienated from his own society, an alienation to which he is completely blind. Projecting his own unacknowledged deficiencies onto his surroundings, he thinks instead there is something wrong with society and fantasizes about building a new world where he will finally fit.” This belief that humanity can be shaped into a perfect form has been the cause of the most vicious tyrannies on the planet from the French Revolution onwards.
As Jamie Glazov notes in his book United in Hate, the totalitarian believer publicly denies the violent pathologies within the system that he worships. Privately, however, these are what drew him towards that system in the first place because he is aware that violence is necessary to destroy the old order so that utopia can arise from its ashes. Pretending he is attracted to “peace,” “justice” and “equality,” he actually stands for their opposite. He needs to empathize with the “martyrs” and the downtrodden in order to validate himself vicariously. The Third World, intrinsically noble since it is uncorrupted by the developed world, provides an apparently inexhaustible supply of such validation. That’s why the image of the Palestinian youth armed with only a slingshot touches the radical soul so deeply, and why the radical does not want to hear—why he even denies—the guns that are ranged just behind that youth as he throws his stones.”
Later, after following through with the history of the coining and idea behind the term “Westoxification,” she has a fabulous paragraph that puts in a pretty bow why the Progressive Left so often finds solace in these radical views you would think it would reject:
The Islamists committing mass murder in New York’s Twin Towers or a Jerusalem cafe really do believe they are fighting for justice and to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. The communists and the fascists really did think they were ending, respectively, the oppression and the corruption of man. The environmentalists really do think they are saving the planet from extinction. The radical left really do think they will erase prejudice from the human heart and suffering from the world. And those who want Israel no longer to exist as a Jewish state really do believe that as a result they will turn suicide bomb belts into cucumber frames, and that they are moving in the way that history intended.
I highly recommend this book. As an agnostic, she has a fair view of this program the Left calls egalitarianism. This egalitarianism trumps their placatory stances on homosexuality, women’s rights, and the like.
Are you on the wrong side or the right side of history? Is there even a “wrong side” or a “right side”? What do those terms mean and why do politicians and pundits use them? Nationally syndicated columnist and best-selling author Jonah Goldberg explains.
Pope John Paul and this Pope are on different ends of the spectrum.
(BBC) “There is a lot of scepticism among (US) Catholics,” says Stephen Moore, the chief economist at the conservative Washington think tank the Heritage Foundation, and himself a Catholic.
“I think this is a Pope who clearly has some Marxist leanings. It’s unquestionable that he has a very vocal scepticism (about) capitalism and free enterprise and… I find that to be very troubling.”
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Most of John Paul’s early life was lived under totalitarian regimes – first the Nazi occupation during World War Two, then the long Stalinist and Soviet domination of Poland during the Cold War. Everything he experienced as a priest and a bishop taught him that communism was the enemy.
Another comment on the large difference between the Pope and his understanding of economics comes from his encyclical, and it notes the rhetoric of the left known to be merely that ~ an economic myth:
He said “some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”
So-called “trickle down” is not an economic theory. It is a pejorative term used by socialists and others in favor of wealth distribution to describe laissez-faire capitalism. A product of the Enlightenment, laissez-faire capitalism was “conceived as the way to unleash human potential through the restoration of a natural system, a system unhindered by the restrictions of government,” writes Toufic Gaspard. For political economist Adam Smith and other classical economists, the concept was inextricably connected to natural rights.
Capitalism Works, better than any other economic system that ~ again ~ WORKS — devised by man.
Michael John Beasley speaks on atheist Christopher Hitchens’ completely shallow views of God and Christianity from his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
I want to deal a bit with Hitchens worldview that is the drive for such a book that uses bad-thinking to get an emotional response (e.g., propaganda). Here Hitchens hat-tips Karl Marx by saying that this [Marx’s Manifesto] was “…OUR first attempt at philosophy, just as it was OUR first attempt at healthcare, cosmology… astronomy, and so on….”
Here is a wonderful documentary (15-parts, they will load automatically) about the Marxist/Leninist philosophy. Before watching the documentary, consider this by a former leader in the 60’s communist movement here in the states:
…To transform society, you need the power of the state; it is the only way their future can be achieved. That is why they are willing to follow the marching orders of a party that can control the state, and that is why they want to advance its fortunes. The Democrats’ perennial campaign message — Republicans are conducting a war on minorities, women, working Americans, and the poor — rests on the central idea that unites progressives behind the party: We are for equality, they are against it.
The reasoning behind such behavior was revealed by Leon Trotsky when he explained why he would not leave the Bolshevik party even after Stalin — who would eventually murder him — became its absolute leader: “We can only be right with and by the Party,” Trotsky said, “for history has provided no other way of being in the right.” “If the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.”
Non-Bolsheviks may not share Trotsky’s metaphysical certitude, but they will recognize the principle. If the cause is about changing the world and there is only one party that can acquire the means to do it, then even though it may be wrong on this or that matter, its fortunes must be advanced and its power defended. This commitment is magnified when the opposition party is viewed as the enemy of the noble cause. If Republicans are seen as the party of privilege at war with minorities, women, and the poor, then their ideas are not only wrong but evil. As President Obama’s political mentor, Saul Alinsky, put it in Rules for Radicals: “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all of the angels are on one side and the devils are on the other.”
Here is another statement from Rules for Radicals: “We are always moral and our enemies always immoral.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the immorality of the opposition, of conservatives and Republicans. If they are perceived as immoral and indecent, their policies and arguments can be dismissed, and even those constituencies that are non-political or “low-information” can be mobilized to do battle against an evil party. In 1996 Senator Bob Dole — a moderate Republican and deal-maker — ran for president against the incumbent, Bill Clinton. At the time, Dick Morris was Clinton’s political adviser. As they were heading into the election campaign, Clinton — a centrist Democrat — told Morris, “You have to understand, Dick, Bob Dole is evil.” That is how even centrist Democrats view the political battle.
Because Democrats and progressives regard politics as a battle of good versus evil, their focus is not on policies that work and ideas that make sense, but on what will make their party win. Demonizing the opposition is one answer; unity is another. If we are divided, we will fail, and that means evil will triumph…
Furthermore, there is ample evidence that the New Party/Progressive Chicago was set up by Marxists, for Marxists, in order to increase far left influence in the Democratic Party, and eventually establish a leftist major party to replace the Democrats entirely.
Strong in the mid to late 1990s, the New Party was an electoral alliance dedicated to electing leftist candidates to office – usually through the Democratic Party.
Two organizations formed the backbone of the New Party – the Democratic Socialists of America and the US’ then largest radical organization, ACORN. Radical labor union SEIU also had considerable input, as did members of the Communist Party USA spin off, Committees of Correspondence. DSA had infiltrated ACORN, SEIU and Committees of Correspondence, so arguably the socialists were the real power behind the New Party.
Bernard and Page were later active in the New Party, while Stand was later jailed as an East German and Soviet spy.
Barack Obama, incidentally, used to attend the annual Socialist Scholars conferences, while studying at Columbia University in New York in the early 1980s.
In Chicago, the New Party founded an equally radical “sister organization,” Progressive Chicago….
Ever since Barack Hussein Obama became president, there has been a notable acceleration in the use of State power to punish, harass, and wreak vengeance on those the left perceives as their enemies. Just a few examples:
Inevitably, when the left-wing comes to power, the first order of business is to punish their perceived enemies. That has been the case in every country in which any brand of Marxism has come into power. There was a naive assumption that the political system of the United States, with its body of laws and system of checks and balances, was immune to these types of abuses. Clearly, the last six years have shown that it is not.
Modern leftism is less a set of political beliefs than a militant pathology. If your political philosophy is based on the idea that those who disagree with you are evil, and/or greedy, and/or racist, and/or homophobic, and/or sexist, then, of course, they need to be punished, and of course, the reason your side was elected was to punish them. Obama himself admitted as much when he stated that the purpose of elections was “to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.” And his administration and his party have done exactly that….
From the “I bet you didn’t know this” files via Breaitbart:
Bill de Blasio is not the only red coming to power in New York City. He will also be joined by a “progressive” majority City Council. Here is a sampling of three of those he will be working with:
—Melissa Mark-Viverito,
top contender for City Council Speaker, went down to Bolivia to campaign for that nation’s marxistdictator, Evo Morales, in 2009. Records of the infamous red narco-terrorist organization FARC show that ties between that organization and Morales stretch all the way back to at least 2003, with meetings organized in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela between senior FARC operatives and Morales. That was two years before Morales’s Chavez-bought “election” in 2005, and the collaboration continues unabated.
a more quiet but equally radical sidekick to her husband Charles Barron. Their views, as voiced by Charles, include: “a special fondness for Castro because of the Cuban leader’s efforts to help several African nations, particularly Angola, in their march toward independence decades ago” (the late Bayard Rustin, a true civil rights champion and architect of the 1963 March on Washington, recognized the Soviet-Cuban rape of Angola as among the most tragic outrages in African history.
Far from any form of “liberation,” the Communist invaders aborted the planned democratic process, plundered the wealth of Angola, and resorted to indiscriminate force and even used chemical weapons. An estimated one million people died in the Angolan civil war. “Robert Mugabe is my hero, and guess what, so is Muammar Qaddafi!” Charles Barron declared in November 2011. In addition to being a tyrant in his own right, Mugabe is sheltering the former Communist dictator of Ethiopia who murdered over one million of his own people–a regime that was defended by Barron’s other hero Fidel Castro, bringing the number of black Africans murdered with Castro’s help to over 2 million. No comment necessary on Qaddafi. He has also expressed hatred of Israel, which earned Charles, a former Black Panther, the endorsement of former KKK leader David Duke.
—Margaret Chin,
former spokeswoman for the Maoist Communist Worker’s Party. She first ran for the City Council in 1991, but thanks to the activism of outraged Chinese-Americans and a man known to New York talk radio fans as “Jimmy from Brooklyn,” her attempt was defeated. In 2009, however, she returned and managed to win the election. It is a sad commentary on society that a longtime fanatical follower of the most tyrannical and bloodthirsty form of Chinese Communism–responsible for the death of some 70 million Chinese people and tens of thousand of Americans in Korea–could get elected on the 20 year anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre.
In 1983, Bill de Blasio took a student trip to the USSR. Now he and his allies are making the rest of us relive their youth.
(See two other posts on this here, and here) Video Description
Hugh Hewitt interviews Uwe Siemon-Netto about the Medias proclivity to blame Republicans for violence… since the JFK days.
From Hugh Hewitt’s blog (http://www.hughhewitt.com/jfk-coveredca-com/):
Today’s studio guest will be Uwe Siemon-Netto, a remarkable man with a long and accomplished life in journalism and theology. Part of the former life was as a correspondent for Springer Foreign News Service which took him around the world, from the UN to Vietnam, and to Dallas in the immediate aftermath of the murder of President Kennedy 50 years ago today. His most recent book, published this past July, concerns his years as a war correspondent in “Vietnam: Duc: A Reporter’s Love For The Wounded People of Vietnam.”
More about the Uwe:
For 57 years, Uwe Siemon-Netto, an international journalist from Germany, has reported about major world events including the construction and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He covered the Vietnam War over a period of five years, from 1965 until 1969 and then again in 1972. He has also written extensively about topics ranging from wine, food, classical music and modern art to religion. At age 50 he interrupted his career to earn an M.A. at a Lutheran seminary in Chicago and a doctorate in theology and sociology of religion at Boston University. His doctoral dissertation titled, The Fabricated Luther: Refuting Nazi Connections and Other Modern Myths, has been widely acclaimed as a resounding argument against the charge that the 16th-century German reformer could have been Hitler’s progenitor. As part of his theological studies Siemon-Netto served as a chaplain to Vietnam veterans in Minnesota and wrote a significant book on pastoral care titled, The Acquittal of God: A Theology for Vietnam Veterans. Dr. Siemon-Netto now lives in southern California as a writer, educator and founding director emeritus of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Capistrano Beach. Part of the year he and his British-born wife, Gillian, spend their time at their home in the Charente region of southwestern France.
