Catholic Bishop Robert Barron has, over the past decade or so, become one of the best-known high-profile figures in American Catholic circles. His book and, later, television series Catholicism have elucidated and clarified the history and teachings of the Catholic Church for thousands. His Word on Fire ministry has played a part in keeping alive the Catholic tradition of public intellectualism. His podcast has facilitated earnest and even thought-provoking debate amongst Catholics and between Catholics and those of other faiths. But his latest published work is, at best, naïve — and, at worst, downright stupid. This way of thinking, championed by Maher and his ilk, destroys objectivity in reasoning and morality. In an op-ed piece for CNN — of all places — published last week, Barron hailed the pot-smoking, atheistic liberal talk show host and sometime-comedian Bill Maher as an “ally.” Barron begins by lamenting Maher’s staunchly-held atheism, glossing the godless pundit’s decades of ranting against God. The bishop then notes that Maher has seemingly pivoted of late to “articulating his opposition to the ‘woke’ ways of thinking that have managed to capture the allegiance of most of the major institutions of our country.” “As he has done so, I have found myself, time and again, nodding my head in agreement,” Barron writes of Maher’s grimly humorous tirades against the woke ideology. “To my surprise, the nemesis had become an ally.” The bishop proceeds to gush over Maher’s commitment to “classical liberalism” and fostering “fraternity across ideologies,” concluding, “Three cheers for Bill Maher!” Like Maher, Barron was born in the latter half of the 1950s. Both men grew up in an American society that no longer exists. In his op-ed, Barron joins Maher in lamenting that those on opposing ends of the political spectrum today tend to view one another as an “existential threat,” instead pining for the days “when Republican President Ronald Reagan and former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a Massachusetts Democrat, could sit down for a friendly drink at the end of a workday.” The fact of the matter is that the opposite ends of the political spectrum are an existential threat to one another. One side clamors that the wanton slaughter of unborn children in a moral imperative, that transing children and horrifically mutilating their genitals is laudably compassionate, that order and authority are meaningless, that morality is determined by emotion, and that God has no place in the public consciousness. The other side argues that human dignity is a gift worth treasuring, that children — born and unborn — should be protected, that order is necessary for society to thrive, that morality transcends mere legal letters, and that all rights and goods are derived from God. The America that both Barron and Maher grew up in is dead — and Maher is among those who contributed to its death. While Barron says that the narcissistic brand of atheism Maher and so many others rabidly promoted and preached over the past several decades “annoyed” him, it did far more than just “annoy” the social fabric of America and the West: it normalized the notion that the human mind reigns supreme over all, including God. It was, in fact, a type of naturalism — the sin of Satan, the declaration that nature can replace Supernature, that the creature can replace the Creator, that man can replace God. This way of thinking, championed by Maher and his ilk, destroys objectivity in reasoning and morality. If there is no God, no eternal Entity who is Truth Himself, then who is man to say what is true? If there is no God, no eternal Entity who is Authority, then by what authority does any man say that this is morally right or that is morally wrong? By man’s own authority, of course, but which man’s authority? Since, without God, man has no authority to appeal to higher than himself, he must appeal to the masses. Enter mob rule and morality by consensus: whatever the largest (or loudest) group of people say is right must be accepted as right. But again, without God, there is no objective imperative, there is nothing compelling man to reason over appetite. Thus, the largest group will more often than not determine morality based on appetite, on emotion, on what “feels” good, since there is no standard to measure what is good. Consensus-based morality, then, becomes not just mob rule but animal mob rule. Worse still, appetites and emotions are easier to manipulate and easier to appeal to than reason. Want to score easy political points? Promise people something that feels good. Sex carries a resulting responsibility — a new human life — so just get rid of that responsibility via abortion. Money is nice to have, so promise that the mob can keep more because you’ve “forgiven” debts that they owe. Getting high is a quick way to forget about pain and misery, so let everyone buy pot, put a cannabis dispensary on every street corner. Just as the bloodthirsty French revolutionaries enthroned a whore in Notre Dame de Paris, so Maher and the ideology he has championed deposed human reasoning and morality and enthroned nothing more than appetite. Despite his clever jabs at transing children, Maher’s own statements bear this out. Discussing abortion, the talk show host did push back against the left-wing narrative that pro-lifers want to oppress women or do away with women’s rights and rightly insisted that pro-lifers genuinely believe abortion is the killing of an unborn child. “They think it’s murder — and it kind of is,” he said. Then the other shoe dropped: “I’m just okay with that. I am. I mean, there’s eight billion people in the world. I’m sorry, we won’t miss you.” Maher and his narcissistic, egocentric philosophy are not deserving of “three cheers.” Barron’s impulse is that of a society that died decades ago. There is no making peace with evil, there is no reconciling the tenets of leftism with those of conservatism, there is not now any common ground to be found. Maher’s ideology saw to that. “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19). READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: The Holy Eucharist and the Hint of an Explanation The Pernicious Persecution of Traditional Catholics The Bogeyman: The Leftists’ Hatred of the Catholic Church The post Bishop Robert Barron Praises Atheist Bill Maher. Why? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

I was in second grade when an assassin’s bullet tore apart the brain of the President of the United States. It was a different time. All but a tiny minority of us readily accepted the official story. It occurred to almost nobody to imagine that upstanding citizens like Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, and Chief Justice Earl Warren would sign their names to a report that they knew to be, or suspected might be, a lie. When, in the years and decades that followed, independent investigators came out with books offering alternate theories about the assassination, some of us read them — I read a couple, with intense interest — and allowed ourselves to be diverted by what seemed like outrageously far-fetched scenarios involving one or more of the following possible culprits: LBJ, the CIA, the FBI, the Mob, Moscow, Havana, and the Texas oil barons. But when we finished reading the books, we set them aside and returned to what we thought was the real world, in which American government institutions and the mainstream American media were nothing less than trustworthy. More and more of us, thank goodness, are realizing — just how demonic the people pulling Biden’s strings are. Not until the candidacy, the presidency, and the post-presidency of Donald Trump were millions of us awakened to the fact that there was indeed a Deep State, a swamp, a morally nefarious political and media and military-industrial establishment, whose membership was not confined to a single party and whose determination to hold on to its own power was so all-consuming that it was capable of doing absolutely anything to destroy anyone whom it recognized as a threat to that power. Trump was that threat. Decades earlier, JFK, who had expressed an interest in reining in the CIA, had perhaps also been a threat. The difference, of course, is that in 1963 it was infinitely easier to hide high-level chicanery than it is in the age of the Internet. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Twelve Corrupt Jurors) Instead of staging a murder in Dallas, the Deep State tried to bring down Trump with the death of a thousand cuts: the Steele Dossier, the “fine people” hoax, the Mar-a-Lago raid, the dismissal of Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation by a small army of intelligence veterans, the drinking-bleach lie, the 2020 election fix, the insurrection narrative, the two impeachments, the high-profile, Soviet-style arrests of Trump allies like Roger Stone, and the innumerable lawsuits, each more absurd than the next. For some of us, the scales fell from our eyes early on. For others, apparently, it didn’t happen until May 30 of this year. Hillary Clinton had gotten away with a litany of actual crimes of the utmost seriousness. Ditto Joe Biden. For years, Trump’s enemies in the judicial system had combed through his history of business activities in search of something he could be charged with. But even to the surprise of some of Trump’s greatest admirers, they found nothing. Somehow, in a long and storied career in big-time New York real estate — a notoriously dirty business — Trump had apparently failed to do anything worth prosecuting. So in the end they felt compelled to make stuff up — and to bend the rules of jurisprudence in pretty much every imaginable way. A judge so crooked that he came off like a mustache-twirling villain in a third-rate Victorian stage melodrama empaneled a jury of twelve Manhattanites — residents of a borough whose economy Trump helped rescue but an overwhelming majority of whose tonier residents hate his guts, in many cases for no other reason than that, in their view, he’s an outer-borough vulgarian — and presided over a disgusting sham of a trial that would have made Stalin blush. On May 30, Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts. And his enemies cheered. “Holy Cow, 34 for 45!” read the sickeningly flippant headline on the column by the New York Times‘s execrable Maureen Dowd. Whether the whole thing had been legally legit or not meant nothing to them. In order to undermine a political enemy, their comrades had contorted the justice system, and for the likes of Dowd that was just plain dandy. There’s disillusion and there’s disillusion. When I was a child I spoke as a child, and so on. I was raised to be a patriot. I grew up in New York City — but in Queens, in an unstoried neighborhood that, according to the quadrennial post-Election Day maps in the New York Times, always stood out from most of the rest of the borough by voting Republican, a neighborhood where even today almost everybody flies the flag on national holidays and gathers in the local park on the Fourth of July to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the National Anthem. As a kid, I wasn’t proud to be an American — being proud would have meant that being an American was some kind of achievement. No, I was honored. I was awed. Being born in the 20th century, in the freest country on earth, and in what was then the planet’s largest and most extraordinary city, seemed to me the greatest privilege any human being since the Assyrian Empire could ever have experienced. I felt I’d triumphed in the lottery of life. If I was proud, I was proud of my country for having saved the world, not so many years before my birth, from the evils of Nazism and of the brutal Empire of Japan, and for, in my own lifetime, serving as the selfless protector of freedom in countries around the world. More specifically, I was proud of men like my uncle Harry Everett Thomas, Jr., who as a young man had been a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force, who after being shot down over Germany had spent several grueling months in a Nazi POW camp, and who ended up retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. As far as I was concerned, he had risked his life and scarred his soul in service to a sublime cause and a glorious republic. To be sure, as I grew up, I increasingly recognized that no country, not even America, could live up to the more admirable chapters of its history at every turn. Movies like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and books like Plunkitt of Tammany Hall opened my eyes to the reality of rampant government corruption. Spending much of my childhood in the Deep South of the early 1960s, I was exposed to racism at its ugliest (as well as to the courage and nobility of ordinary people who took significant risks to oppose it). Humans, after all, are imperfect creatures, some of them quite terribly imperfect. What distinguishes Americans from other homo sapiens isn’t that we’re any better than other people; it’s that we’re gifted with a political system built on a Declaration of Independence that is unique in the nobility of its ideals and a Constitution that was brilliantly designed to rein in the worst of human impulses and encourage the best. But it’s one thing to revere our founding documents; it’s another to buy into the naive belief that every one of the people who rule us shares our reverence for them and wakes up every morning determined to live by them. Alas, the Trump years made Plunkitt and his ilk, and the tough-as-nails Boss Jim Taylor in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, look like rank amateurs. Nothing I had ever read or seen or heard of had prepared me for the sheer ruthlessness of the Deep State — the utter indifference to our country’s founding values, the thoroughgoing disinterest in the truth itself — that underlay its cynical campaign to demolish Donald Trump. And these people weren’t just out to crush Trump — in the course of doing so, they were perfectly willing to topple the very pillars of American liberty. But even for many of us who had spent years observing that anti-Trump campaign, the verdicts of May 30 represented a step beyond. For the first time ever, a former President had been officially — and unjustly — marked as a felon. Plenty of his predecessors actually had committed felonies — the names LBJ, Clinton, and Obama come immediately to mind — but had never come close to being prosecuted, let alone convicted. “This is bigger than Trump. This is bigger than me. This is bigger than my presidency,” Trump said after the verdicts came down. He was right. What happened on May 30 marked the culmination of years of absolutely spectacular abuse of power by his enemies, and it was the ultimate confirmation that there are countless Americans in positions of high authority for whom their own sinecures in one branch of government or another mean infinitely more than the principles that they swore to uphold when they took those jobs. The schemes they have hatched over these past several years, and the grotesque travesty that went down in that Manhattan courtroom during the past few weeks, concluding on May 30, makes it blindingly — and, yes, painfully — obvious that America is no longer the country many of us thought it was and loved it for being. Is it possible that it hasn’t really been that country since November 22, 1963? (READ MORE: Biden Is George III. Who Does That Make Trump?) To find oneself thinking such things is to be drenched with grief. It makes one look back at one’s life and see all sorts of things in a very different light. Yes, for most of us America was and has been a land of freedom and of plenty. It has been a blessing to immigrants from all over the world who, coming to America with next to nothing in their pockets, have made successful careers, bought their own homes, and seen their children thrive. But for those who’ve come too close to uncovering the mischievous machinations of the permanent bureaucracy, it’s been a country in which the FBI could break into your home in the middle of the night, arrest you on trumped-up charges, tie up your life for years with baseless lawsuits, and drive you into bankruptcy with legal fees — if not worse. America is a very beautiful house — the most beautiful house on the block — but its upper story is infested with rabid rats that need to be dealt with. But there is hope. One positive sign is that more and more former never-Trumpers have been moved by the injustices done to him by his enemies to reconsider their opinions of him and, indeed, of his whole long list of judicial entanglements. Another positive sign is that a great many deep-pocketed Americans have been motivated by the Trump verdicts to make huge donations to his presidential campaign. They realize — as more and more of us, thank goodness, are realizing — just how demonic the people pulling Biden’s strings are, and just how little they care for the values on which this country was founded. And this swelling new assemblage of Trump supporters see that if this evil cabal isn’t removed from power prontissimo and replaced by a government of, by, and for the people — and doesn’t that sound quaint now? — the America envisioned by our Founders, and built up over the generations by our forefathers, will be lost forever. The post The Trump Verdict Is a Turning Point for America appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — Jurors are tougher than voters. They expect defendants — or their lawyers — to tell the truth. Hence the 34 guilty verdicts on charges that former President Donald Trump falsified business records to influence the 2016 election. White House Counsel’s Office spokesperson Ian Sams released a statement in which he said, “We respect the rule of law.” Don’t get me wrong. I still think Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg engaged in prosecutorial overreach with a case based on amorphous charges for moldy behavior. That is, the prosecution engaged in election interference fueled by partisan rancor. So I believe Trump is likely to see the verdict and sentencing reversed on appeal because you don’t prosecute a former president based on novel legal theory. But for now, Trump is a convicted felon. And that’s in part because Trump was dishonest. He rightly chose not to testify, but he wrongly spent years denying that he had relations with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, who were paid $130,000 and $150,000, respectively, in “hush money.” As Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told CNN, “You don’t pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you.” Also, I don’t think jurors appreciate giving up weeks of their lives for someone who didn’t take the process seriously. The guilty verdict may not be good news for President Joe Biden. As Trump maintained after the verdict, “The real verdict will be Nov. 5 by the people, and they know what happened here.” As for Biden, sure, the 81-year-old will be running against a convicted felon — but that feeds into Trump’s pose as a victim of a “rigged” system and an underdog. And really, it’s hard to look like a winner when your 77-year-old opponent could be in handcuffs at any time. Another fly in the ointment: The president’s son Hunter is set to go to trial next week on federal charges related to lying about his drug use to buy a gun in 2018. Hunter Biden, a Yale Law graduate, also faces charges of tax evasion. According to the indictment by special counsel David Weiss, the president’s son stands accused of spending money he didn’t pay on taxes instead on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes.” After the guilty verdict, White House Counsel’s Office spokesperson Ian Sams released a statement in which he said, “We respect the rule of law, and have no additional comment.” But this is not the last word. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE from Debra J. Saunders: 2024 Could Be a Race Between Bidenomics, Trump Tax Cuts Libertarian Party Says, ‘Become Ungovernable.’ Trump Says OK. The post Trump Is Now a Convicted Felon. That May Not Be Good for Biden. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Last week the Islamist theocrats who rule Iran buried one of their own, President Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a helicopter crash week before last. In the manner of dictatorships, the Iranian authorities promoted massive displays of grief, with crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Some, of course, may have been genuinely mournful, while one suspects that the vast majority attended because they knew that the secret police were counting heads. It’s ever so in dictatorships.  The morally-compromised International Criminal Court indicts Israel for its efforts to bring Hamas to justice, and it receives the applause of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. One suspects that more than a few, however quietly, attended in that spirit of going to a funeral to make sure that the deceased is really dead. Representatives of 68 nations attended, some from the usual rogues gallery of tyrants, some from those countries the mullahs have so assiduously cultivated — one might say “bribed” — and some from countries that should have had the grace and good sense to avoid rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ismail Haniyeh, widely regarded as the overall leader of Hamas, someone that even our own State Department, notably squeamish about the applying the term, has designated as a terrorist. The Taliban were there as well, and all manner of bad actors. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: What the Red Ball Express Teaches Us About Ukraine) Unsurprisingly, loud chants of “death to America” rose up from the throngs of mourners, along with acclaim for the October 7 Hamas massacres of innocent Israeli civilians. With Iran’s Revolutionary Guards orchestrating the proceedings, the cheerleaders for rape and murder were out in full force. Now the cheers have faded, and, if we are to believe the Iran experts, it’s unlikely that Raisi’s passing will mean much with respect to the power structure within Iran or in terms of Iran’s relations with the world. Raisi’s death removed one obvious candidate to succeed the aging and increasingly frail Ayatollah Khamenei, but there’s nothing to indicate anything resembling a real shakeup in Iranian internal affairs. The Revolutionary Guards Council’s stranglehold on Iranian domestic politics and foreign policy will likely remain, as will Iran’s weird fusion of Stalinist repression and Shiite fundamentalism. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis will still be Teheran’s puppets, deployed against us at the Mullah’s bidding. Israel will continue to be the “little Satan,” we will be the “great Satan” and the thoughts of some kind of grand rapprochement with Iran, a revival, for example, of the once-touted nuclear deal, will remain nothing more than a fever dream of the Obama holdovers running the Biden administration’s foreign policy. But before we close the books on Raisi, we might do well to reflect upon the meaning of his life and ponder some of the overseas reactions to his death, both in other countries and within the ranks of our own so-called “progressive” elites. Arguably, his death offers a kind of Rorschach test, an inkblot through which a certain prominent strain of politico/moral values might stand revealed. It’s rare, after all, to experience a moment when we’re invited so forcefully to reflect upon the historical significance of a genuinely monstrous human being. Raisi’s sobriquet, the “Butcher of Teheran” was eminently deserved. A product of the revolution that overthrew the Shah, the same revolution that “held America hostage” for 444 days. He was one of those young men who rejoiced in the deaths of American special operators in a rescue attempt gone terribly wrong, one of the earliest of the “hate America” crowd. But even more, his hatred encompassed the secular and open-spirited Iran that had emerged in the 60s and 70s, an Iran ready to move on from the Shah’s autocracy, but not in the direction of the religious fanatics.  Raisi, however, and the thousands of religious radicals like him, had other plans for the country. From the very beginning he embraced and exemplified the violent passions of the revolution. He and his comrades, in a manner akin to Lenin’s Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, formed a hard core vanguard, dedicated to taking control of the revolution and bending it to the purposes of the Ayatollah. Raisi soon became a leading light of the newly-created “judicial” system, rising rapidly through the ranks, making a name for himself as the most radical enforcer of the new Shiite dictatorship. To quote Amnesty International, over the past 44 years Raisi was “directly involved in or oversaw the enforced disappearance and extrajudicial executions of thousands of political dissidents.” He also oversaw the “torture of thousands of protestors and violent persecution of women and girls defying compulsory veiling, among other serious human rights violations.” He was a member of the “death commission” that in 1988 was responsible for the murder of thousands of political prisoners. As recently as 2018, he publicly defended these massacres as “one of the proud achievements of the Islamic Republic.”  In the same article, Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa offered the following blunt assessment. Raisi should have been “criminally investigated” for “crimes against humanity … while he was alive,” and that his death “should not rob his victims and their families of their right to truth and to see all others complicit in his crimes held to account.” Even in a world pockmarked with horror, one would look very hard to find someone as evil — as purely evil — as Raisi. One might wish, with Ms. Eltahawy, that Raisi’s death would not prevent an accounting with his crimes, but the world’s reaction to his death offers little reason for comfort. We might start with Iran’s major allies, Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and Kim’s North Korea. I’ll leave the proofs of renewed “Axis of Evil” for a dedicated analysis later, but it’s instructive that Putin, Xi, and Kim all singled out Raisi for praise. Putin characterized Raisi as a “man of his word” and “always good to work with” while expressing  his sympathy to Iran. China’s Xi noted that Raisi’s death meant that “the Chinese people have lost a good friend.” North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, described Raisi’s death as “a great loss.”  But it didn’t stop there. The U.S. State Department issued a press release expressing “official condolences” for the death of Raisi and the others killed in the helicopter crash (a statement, fortunately, condemned by Republicans in the House of Representatives). At the United Nations, Security Council representatives, including U.S. Deputy Ambassador, Robert Wood, stood in respect in a “moment of silence,” a move condemned by Israel’s U.N. Ambassador, Gilad Erdan. Erdan scathingly observed that the council had “bowed its head for a man responsible for massacring and murdering thousands in Iran, in Israel, and around the globe. What next? Will the Council dedicate a moment of silence to commemorate Hitler?”  We might do well to take Ambassador Erdan’s question and ask it of those among us who’ve spent the months since October 7 praising Hamas. After all, and at every level, from the steps of Congress to our college campuses, what we’ve witnessed has been nothing less than an outpouring of support for moral monstrosity not seen since the days of Hitler. And Ebrahim Raisi was just such a moral monster, and the regime he served so fanatically lives to perpetuate such monstrosity at home and to expand it across the world. If our campus protestors and their enablers retained a shred of moral decency, Raisi’s death and, even more, his life, might have served as the occasion for stepping back from their fatuous indulgences in hatred. They might have looked in the mirror and seen in themselves something very like the young Raisi of 1980, aflame with hatred, burning to impose his vision on others, regardless of their hopes and dreams. It might have been an occasion to demonstrate their solidarity with the women of Iran, who truly are the victims of unremitting religious repression.  But no, no such thing has occurred, because these people lack the moral compass necessary to understand what real repression looks like. Instead, they pretend that campus cops are the IDF. Palestinian cosplay as ridiculous as the “Handmaid’s Tale” costumes of a few short years ago. The morally-compromised International Criminal Court indicts Israel for its efforts to bring Hamas to justice, and it receives the applause of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, cheered on at a conference sponsored by groups linked to Hamas. Would that she and others like her might be given pause by the example of Raisi’s life, by the necessity of an accounting for the horrors properly laid at his tomb. But we can hardly expect those who identify with murderers and rapists to understand the moral deficiencies exemplified in Raisi’s life. (READ MORE: The Hero Who Saved a Cathedral) I’m not a fan of demonstrations. In a better world, college students would go to class, go to the library, work hard to understand, honestly, the world around them, and equip themselves to contribute positively through the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired. In a better world, they would learn at the feet of professors dedicated to honest and open inquiry, not narrow-minded ideologues, themselves uncomfortably akin in spirit to men such as Raisi. It’s scarcely accidental that no less a figure than the Ayatollah Khamenei himself has now praised both these students and the leftist professors who’ve nurtured and encouraged them. Nor is it accidental that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has now chosen to blame the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas on the Abraham Accords, the most notable Middle East peace initiative in decades. In a better world, voters would reject the likes of AOC, Tlaib, and Omar and all those who surf the waves of hatred. In a better world, our U.N. Security Council representative would have kept his butt firmly planted in his seat, rather than honoring the “Butcher of Teheran.”  I long instead for a day when our leaders would stand up once more for America, for the good people of this country, the ordinary citizens of this and all the preceding generations who’ve worked, who’ve built, who’ve farmed, who’ve raised families, all whose diligence has given us a country still envied around the world. Americans have just observed Memorial Day, reminded of all those who gave their lives so that we could live in freedom and enjoy the pursuit of happiness that is our birthright as Americans. Perhaps our leaders might stand up for them. James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region, and a forthcoming sequel carries the Reprisal team from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.  The post The Death of a Theocrat and Our Morally Obtuse Progressives appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

There was a Jason Bourne movie with no Jason Bourne (The Bourne Legacy), and now we have a Mad Max movie with no Mad Max. This one is titled Furiosa and is billed as “A Mad Max Saga.” It is replete with the requisite explosions and lengthy chase scenes one comes to expect in a Mad Max movie, but still, the movie could have used a heavy dose of the franchise’s eponymous hero, Mr. Rockatansky, if only for honesty’s sake. Furiosa lacks the straightforward, uncomplicated, thoughtless, linear fun of Fury Road. Furiosa, of course, was the hero, or co-hero with a Tom Hardy Max, in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, a two-hour car chase masquerading as a movie that was nominated for 10 Oscars (winning six) and is generally acclaimed by critics as one of the great action movies of our time. This one received similar, albeit occasionally muted, accolades from the pundit class. Robert Daniels at Roger Ebert.com called it “simply one of the best prequels ever made.” Other reviewers wagged their chins at its thematic complexity, at its more engaged dialogue and character building. One said director George Miller may have been aiming at a larger message — “that men destroy and women renew.” The moviegoing public, though, didn’t catch the spirit. Opening weekend sales figures were staggeringly low. Furiosa claims the worst Memorial Day opening weekend in 40 years. How bad was it? John Nolte at Breitbart lays out what the movie had going for it: The prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road earned great reviews, opened on the perfect weekend for a blockbuster, and with no competition in its action lane. What’s more, it’s based on a successful franchise and Warner’s promoted the living hell out of it. And yet, it went down in flames as though struck by a volley of thundersticks. The movie cost $168 million to make but garnered a mere $32 million at the box office over the four-day weekend. It narrowly (“by a hair,” as the AP put it) captured the weekend over (wait for it) Garfield. (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: Trouble in the Picklesphere) That’s what happens when you take a popular, blowout successful franchise and turn it over to the diversity police. Hollywood should know this by now — after what wokeness did to the Ghostbusters, Terminator, and Men in Black franchises; the Charlie’s Angels remake of 2019; and the last couple of James Bond movies with the newly neutered 007. But that isn’t to absolve the movie of its other transgressions. Furiosa on Its Own Merits Mad Max without Max begins with young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) picking peaches in an incongruously verdant spot on the stark and desiccated postapocalyptic landscape called the Green Place of Many Mothers. She’s kidnapped by followers of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), long-haired leader of the Biker Horde, and dragged off. Her mother chases after to rescue her but is herself captured and executed before young Furiosa’s eyes. This sets up the rest of the story: Furiosa’s vengeance campaign against Dementus. The Biker Horde captures Gas Town, setting up a parlay with Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the white-mained ruler of the Citadel familiar from Fury Road. Dementus turns Gas Town over to Joe for water and food, and he throws in Furiosa as a lagniappe. She is destined to join the concubines Immortan Joe keeps to breed male offspring known in Fury Road as “the Wives.” But Furiosa retreats into anonymity under Immortan Joe, passing herself off as one the demented leader’s War Boys, until we find her on a war rig fighting for control of the Bullet Farm. Numerous other chases and battles ensue until finally Furiosa has Dementus at her mercy, and her vengeance is satisfied. The movie ends with Furiosa secreting the Wives into the bowels of a war rig as she readies to set off from the Citadel for Gas Town (and freedom) and the start of Fury Road.  The best chase scene in Furiosa comes in the middle of the movie — not a good sign in an action movie — when a two-section tanker, shining in the sun, with a deadly makeshift whirring blade dangling from behind, barrels down the blacktop under attack from a horde of marauders on bikes hurling thundersticks and paragliders tossing bombs from above. Also, the last 30 minutes are a total anticlimax, regardless of how big the chases or explosions leading up to it or how dramatic and moving the coup de grace, because you know Furiosa makes it through because she has to star in Fury Road, which has been out for nine years. The movie belongs to Anya Taylor-Joy, the adult Furiosa. Everybody talked about the power and expressiveness of her wide-set eyes, which may be true enough, but she’s 5 feet 8 inches and a little on the lean side. Charlize Theron, at least, is a 6-footer with believable aggression — she and Hardy have a good, credible tussle when first meeting at the war rig in Fury Road. Its hard to see Taylor-Joy carrying Theron’s measure of heft. Thankfully, she doesn’t beat up a roomful of buff guys at any point, but she throws a punch here and there and ends the movie pounding Hemsworth for a good two or three minutes, although he is at a disadvantage, to be fair, by having his hands shackled behind his back. (READ MORE: A Confusing and Ambiguous Civil War) The movie does feature some fun stuff. Dementus wears a cape and straps a teddy bear amulet to his outfit and rides around in a chariot pulled by three motorcycles and is accompanied by the “History Man,” a grizzled figure who provides historical, or ahistorical, commentary. And we get to see up close what we were only distantly shown in Fury Road, that is, Gas Town and the Bullet Farm. We also see the Green Place of Many Mothers when it was still green, and even the Australian outback again, like in the first three Mad Max movies (Fury Road was filmed in Namibia). And some characters from Fury Road show up as well: younger versions of Immortan Joe and the People-Eater and the Bullet Farmer. Like Fury Road, there’s no foul language in this one that I could hear, and no sex, although Immortan Joe gave his kids interesting names — Rictus Erectus and Scrotus. The movie lacked the extemporaneity of the four other films. A lot of the ancillary items — the decorations, the throwaway detritus — take on less of an ad hoc nature in Furiosa. They don’t seem like the artifacts of a destroyed world reclaimed for their necessity, like football helmets and shoulder pads worn for their utility; they seem designed, clever, branded, camp — like they were placed in the movie to look cool on purpose. Furiosa lacks the straightforward, uncomplicated, thoughtless, linear fun of Fury Road. Charlize Theron was a co-hero in that flick, but Tom Hardy (as Max Rockatansky) was in the war rig with her the whole way. It was a great movie where good guys were chased by bad guys — out and back. Two hours went by like two minutes. Furiosa lacked all that. There is a good girl pursued by two bad guys, neither of which is mean enough to gain dominance of the screen in a story that leaves you wondering at many places why what is going on is going on. And it lacked one other thing: Max Rockatansky. The post A Max-less Mad Max appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Among the articles I read this Memorial Day about heroes and generations past that accomplished great things without the benefit of cell phones, Google, or oat milk, was one concerning the discovery of the original letter announcing the award of the Dickin Medal to Judy of Sussex.  To the many who have never heard of the Dickin Medal, in Britain it is the equivalent of the Victory Cross, but for animals.  But who was Judy of Sussex, you ask?  Well, that’s a story. After the war, Williams would adopt Judy, and Judy would live her final days with Williams on a farm in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Judy was an English pointer serving as a ship’s dog — or mascot — in the British Navy.  She served on two different Yangtze River Gunboats in China, the second of which — HMS Grasshopper — moved down to Singapore shortly after the start of WWII.  While still in China, she helped save her ship by barking to alert her sleeping crewmates of approaching Yangtze River pirates, but her real exploits would come later. (READ MORE from Brandon Crocker: History Is More Complex Than Ideology) Singapore was supposed to be impregnable.  But on December 10th, 1941 the Japanese sank the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and cruiser HMS Repulse, and the Imperial Japanese Army was making its way relentlessly down the Malay Peninsula, pushing on towards Singapore whose large defensive guns where designed to repel attacks from the sea. On the evening of February 13, 1942, HMS Grasshopper and her sister ship, HMS Dragonfly, were the last significant vessels to leave Singapore before the British surrender on February 15th.  Dragonfly was filled largely with soldiers; Grasshopper was overflowing mostly with civilian evacuees — and Judy. On the morning of February 14th, Dragonfly and Grasshopper where spotted by a Japanese sea plane, and a few hours later they were attacked by dozens of Japanese aircraft.  Dragonfly was hit and sunk.  Grasshopper was also hit but was able to beach itself about 100 yards from a small island.  The Japanese planes strafed the Grasshopper and the inflatable life boats making their way to the island, but many of the crew and passengers reached the island safely. Judy was not among them. After the Japanese planes vanished, a detail of Royal Marines searched the island for a source of fresh water, but found nothing.  So a crew member, Lt. George White, swam the shark-infested waters back to the smoldering Grasshopper to try to retrieve supplies.  There he discovered Judy half submerged in the water, trapped under a row of fallen metal lockers.  White brought Judy, along with some supplies, back to the island, but they were still without fresh water — until Judy dug up a natural spring high on the beach. That kept the survivors alive for several days until a rescue boat picked them up (along with a few survivors from the Dragonfly). Judy and some of the surviving crews of Grasshopper and Dragonfly eventually made their way on foot across the island of Sumatra (Judy surviving a crocodile attack on the way) only to end up in the hands of the Japanese. Judy was then interred with her human friends in a series of hellish POW camps where she proved her worth catching rats and snakes to supplement her own and the POWs’ meager rations. She would also meet an RAF radar man named Frank Williams, with whom she would form a close bond.   The camp in which Judy and Williams met was run by a Colonel Banno. In order to provide some protection for Judy from the often cruel and sadistic guards, Williams convinced Banno to make Judy a POW, making her the only officially registered animal POW.  But Banno would soon leave and his successor did not care for dogs, or for the fact that Judy gave the men comfort, so when they were to move to a new camp via an old freighter, he commanded that Judy be left behind. Williams, however, devised a plan to smuggle Judy on board in a canvas sack. Unfortunately, the unmarked freighter travelling in a convoy of other Japanese vessels was torpedoed by a British submarine. Williams was able to push Judy out of a porthole of the sinking ship and then tried to find an avenue for his own escape.  Les Searle, a member of the Dragonfly crew who made the trek across Sumatra with Judy, reported seeing her helping a drowning POW before she, herself, was pulled into a fishing boat.   Colonel Banno just happened to be on the docks at Singapore and witnessed the bedraggled POWs disembarking, which proved fortuitous for Judy. Peter Hartley, who wrote an exceptional memoir of his experiences as a POW called Escape to Captivity (long out of print and hard to find) movingly described what then happened: As soon as the wounded had been landed and lodged in the waiting lorries, the rest of the prisoners were ordered to disembark.  There followed an anxious moment when the guards attempted to throw Judy back into the sea, but the old colonel [Banno] stepped forward in the nick of time and ordered her reprieve.  As he bent down to pat her he atoned for many of his past cruelties in the eyes of those who were anxiously watching the drama enacted. Judy and Williams would be reunited in Singapore but then were sent off to an even more brutal experience being forced to build a railway across Sumatra.  In defense of her fellow captives, she would be shot at, kicked at, and near the end, ordered to be exterminated.  But she survived.  And it was Judy’s barking that notified her campmates that the Japanese guards had fled and British paratroopers had arrived. After the war, Williams would adopt Judy, and Judy would live her final days with Williams on a farm in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). There have been a few books written about Judy. The best is No Better Friend by Robert Weintraub (2015).  There is also Damien Lewis’ Judy (2014).  Much of the material for both these books comes from The Judy Story (1973), compiled by Edwin Varley from the reminiscences of four Royal Navy veterans who shared many of Judy’s experiences.  A few years ago, I also wrote a screenplay treatment which, tragically, has not been produced.  I was able to use some of my research on that project, however, for my novel, Burma Road, (which is not about Judy, but does have a British soldier escaping from the fall of Singapore). (READ MORE: Globalism in Trade Is No Vice) The bronze plaque that Frank Williams made for Judy’s final resting place in Tanzania has long since vanished.  But we can and should still remember her and the history of which she was a part. Brandon Crocker is the author of the novel Burma Road (Moonshine Cove, 2024). The post A Dog To Remember appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

A powerful, swelling wave of anti-Semitism on American campuses has surprised many an observer. I was not one of them. The writing was on the wall once radical leftism seized control of America’s higher education in the wake of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. Still, anti-Jewish animus remained as a pervasive, if unspoken, undercurrent. It was usually masked as “anti-Zionism.” I witnessed it at over a dozen academic institutions I was associated with in various ways. While both an undergraduate and graduate student I made it a rule to attend as many lectures and sit in on as many classes in as many institutions of higher education as possible. (READ MORE: Antisemitism Is Not a Major) I went to four colleges on a six-year plan. Why? My American foster family in California wanted me to study banking and computer science; I wanted to major in history and international relations. So I put myself through college and, then, an Ivy League graduate school, which allowed me to hop around its three sister institutions and a related one. I ended up teaching: at three community colleges, three universities, and now my mother ship, the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school of international affairs and national security in Washington, D.C. Here’s what I have seen in most of these places and the conclusions I have drawn. American academia has been slowly turning totalitarian, reminding me of my childhood in Communist Poland and stories I heard about Nazi Germany. The basic totalitarian framework and complementary attitudes were in place already in the early 1980s. A German resistor against Hitler, who had been briefly a Nazi sympathizer, Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, admitted that he did not stand up to the Third Reich until it was too late. “In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.” In American universities we have a similar situation. First, they came for the conservatives, then for moderates, and, finally, for the Jews. The reasons and mechanism of repression are quite predictable. Jews in particular have irked the radicals because of Israel and because of their efforts to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. In our intellectual context where moral relativism is king and deconstruction rules, the Holocaust remains virtually the only unassailable phenomenon of America’s culture. You can deny Communist crimes all you want, but not the Holocaust: at least not yet. There have been negationist cranks, of course. However, overall, the screaming truth of the Shoah seems permanent. Is it, though? It seems that soon the verity of the Holocaust will come under serious fire. Why? Because it contradicts the narrative of the intersectional revolution. Where is your white privilege? The answer is simple: In Auschwitz. This cannot endure. First, the radicals have set out to balance, and, then, overthrow the legacy of Auschwitz with their anti-Israeli propaganda: Israelis are Nazis, of course, and Israel is an apartheid state. That’s an old saw in radical circles which has now emerged in full bloom in mainstream academia — freedom of speech, you see. Next, there will naturally be moves against the legacy of the Shoah. To secure the domination of the intersectional revolution the Holocaust must go because, whereas everything else must be “critiqued,” i.e., besmirched and relativized, there is only room for radical leftist absolutism. Everything else is competition for martyrdom and the moral high ground. And then Israel stands athwart of the leftist revolutionary project. Israel is the last Western nation state that behaves like a nation state in pursuit of its interests and its very survival. There is no room for an outlier like this in our globalist universe, where the European Union is the progressives’ dream. Like with conservatives in academia earlier, who challenged the leftist totalitarian monoculture of American universities, Israel must be delegitimized. The smears that applied earlier to conservatives now serve to disparage Israel: a genocidal state and an apartheid state. Reductio ad Hitlerum once again. We are told that Zionism is racism: the Soviets started that trope. And the Israelis are Nazis and, of course, fascists. For now this applies to Bibi Netanyahu and his Likud, and also to the settlers. Soon all Israelis and their supporters will be tarred with the same brush unless they go woke, intersectional, and self-dissolve by, preferably, committing mass suicide. The aim is to destroy the “Zionist entity.” This will require seizing the moral high ground; the story of the Holocaust will have to be overshadowed by the Nakba, the tragedy that Israel’s detractors believe to have been the state’s founding act, and the Palestinian genocide that allegedly stems from Israel’s existence. I have observed this nefarious logic develop since I came to this country in 1982: first delegitimize and cancel the conservatives, then the nationalists, including, ultimately, Israeli ones and their supporters. At the College of San Mateo in California only campus security — retired cops — under Lieutenant Bogan, were openly conservative and anti-Communist. The most outspoken faculty and students hated the United States and they hated Ronald Reagan, both of whom I loved. They hated his attempts to topple the Evil Empire. Since Israel was America’s partner in the endeavor, their approach to the Jewish state was rather icy, while, admittedly, no open anti-Jewish venom was evident yet. (READ MORE: To Hell With the Universities) Soon, I became a frequent visitor to the Hoover Institution, where I learned at the feet of the late Robert Conquest. Outside of his office, I saw Stanford University’s pro-Sovietism and anti-traditionalism in action: “Hey, ho! Western Civ has got to go,” the radicals chanted. There was also affirmation of Third World causes, including that of Palestine. Israel got slammed. So long as they were leftist, Jewish actors were celebrated like other fellow radicals. This was not the case with conservative and libertarian figures, including Jews such as, for example, Milton Friedman. Lesson learned: Jewishness does not grant one immunity from progressive hate. At the same time, I volunteered for Amnesty International at UC Berkeley. My bailiwick was Asia: between Afghanistan and China. My boss, Sister Laola Hironaka, was considered a “fascist,” of course, because she supported Eden Pastora and his Contras in Nicaragua, and she also backed Israel. I remember when we collected signatures to stop Communist torture in Afghanistan, campus leftists tried to mob us: “Why are you doing this? Perhaps it is in their culture? Don’t be a cultural imperialist and impose your values on Third World people.” Translation: it’s okay to torture people so long as it is for the benefit of the Red revolution. Later, the Communists picketed our Afghanistan conference to help the victims of bombing and torture. I’m not kidding. These were the same people who called Sister Laola a “fascist.” Of course, I was a “fascist” by default for being an anti-Communist. The only bright lights at Berkeley for me were Professor Martin Malia, a Soviet expert, and Professor George Lenczowski, a Middle East specialist. The latter joked that it took him 14 years to discover who the other conservative was at the Department of Political Science. His views on the Middle East were extremely balanced: respect of the Muslims (conservative monarchies in particular, and understanding of Israel’s predicament). But he was an exception. Meanwhile, I ended up at San Francisco State University, where — though a leftist — Professor Anthony D’Agostino, who taught Russia, tolerated my anti-Communism and conservatism. However, I remember clashing with a Maoist professor who called for “a revolution of villages” in San Francisco, and his student followers who tried to intimidate me. It did not work. The Same happened with another professor who hated the paper I wrote on the Polish-Bolshevik War I wrote for his methodology class, the only history class in my career where I received a B+ instead of an A. I guess that is because the Poles won, to the academic’s great chagrin. My true refuge at SFSU was Professor Stuart Creighton Miller, who taught me international relations. He fought against the Communists as a pilot in Korea. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. for human rights. And in the 1970s he began defending Israel. I recall his anger when a scurrilous anti-Israel piece appeared in our student newspaper. “They are shrewd,” he bellowed, “to publish it on a Friday. I’ll have to wait until next week to rebut it.” Still, anti-Jewish animus remained as a pervasive, if unspoken, undercurrent. It was usually masked as “anti-Zionism.” Later, I also saw it at Columbia, where I attended graduate school. After the U.S. launched its operation to liberate Kuwait, there were demonstrations on campus. I was the only graduate student who objected to the burning of the American flag. Happily, there was a handful of undergrads who dubbed themselves Zionists, perhaps five kids or so, that intrepidly pressed against the leftist sea and chanted “USA! USA!” In exchange, they got an earful, including ethnic slurs. Around that time, at Columbia’s public event, a visiting rapper, Dr. Dre, addressed the student audience as follows: “Welcome to Columbia Jewniversity in Jew York City.” Liberalism did not allow the Columbia administration to intervene forcefully; there was a bit of whining, partly crocodile tears, in the aftermath of the scandal, but its feebleness confirmed the university’s tolerance of anti-Semitism, so long as it was expressed by the Fanonian wretched of the earth. At Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles … I heard an open attack on Israel: the usual refrain about apartheid, if not yet Nazism. Aside from perfunctory babble from the university’s president, none of it seemed to bother Columbia’s academic establishment much. They were busy enforcing ideological uniformity. At my historical methodology seminar, for example, the instructor required us to read Leon Trotsky’s propaganda book on the revolution in Russia, not as a primary source but as an academic monograph. When I asked the instructor for a suggestion of an alternative scholarly interpretation of revolutions, he scoffed: “Like who? A monarchist?” I responded: “Why not?” He briskly brushed me off. (READ MORE: Universities Must End DEI and Implement DEI) It was solely by my own effort that I later discovered Jacob L. Talmon and his Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Otherwise, he was a non-person at Columbia, at least in my classes. Lesson learned: Communist psychopathic mass murderers could serve as role models for budding historians at Columbia, but brilliant intellectual defenders of freedom cannot. A revolutionary of Jewish origin was eulogized; his polar opposite was disappeared. What obtained at Columbia also concerned other Ivies. I heard lectures at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard: we even had an exchange program with them, where one could take classes there to augment Columbia’s offerings and vice versa. The same spirit ruled, though at Yale one could still enjoy (the now late) Professor Piotr Wandycz. At Harvard I delighted meeting my family’s former neighbor and friend, Professor Adam Ulam. Neither of them was politically correct, even if both were rather restrained publicly about their anti-Communist reflexes. After Ulam’s death I greatly benefited from the kindness of his widow, Molly, when I taught at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In its predictably stifling leftist atmosphere, gentlemanly Professor Kenneth Thompson at the Miller Center provided much needed intellectual relief. Otherwise, it was predictable. Conservative thought was discouraged, leftism was promoted, and the topic of Israel was avoided as an embarrassment. At Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where I taught summer school, the affairs were similar to UVA except that, for the first time, at a faculty party I heard an open attack on Israel: the usual refrain about apartheid, if not yet Nazism. There were exceptions. Earlier, in the late 1990s, I parked myself by the University of Chicago Law School to finish my dissertation. Thanks to the Antient and Honorable Edmund Burke Society there I found myself in my element among a bevy of fellow conservatives and anti-Communists. For the first time, I was among the likeminded. We had conservatism galore, Communism de rigueur, and no one mistook Israel for the Third Reich. While in Chicago, it was a delight to be able to visit Mecosta, Michigan, to pay tribute to late Dr. Russell Kirk and to sing Polish war songs with his widow, Annette. A perfect setting for America’s prime academic experience, the Kirk Center was (and is) everything that a U.S. university should be. I found there everything that was missing from Columbia and other places. Last but not least, as for as exceptions, I shall shill for my mother ship, the Institute of World Politics. Freedom of speech rules; there is no selective sensibility where one hates Pinochet and gets giddy over Pol Pot. We study equally revolutionary and progressive propositions as well as conservative and libertarian thought. Jews are not Nazis here and Israel not the Third Reich. And our students actually know how to spell the word Palestine and to locate the river and the sea on the map. I should know. I teach, among other things, Geography and Strategy, and not leftist anti-Semitism. The post Our Universities: Israel Hatred and Anti-Semitism is Old News appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In 1981 Chaim Potok published a novel about Japan called The Book of Lights based on his experience of living in Japan as a chaplain in the U.S. army after the Korean War. Potok had been raised as a traditional observant Jew and was later ordained as a Rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Naturally his worldview stemmed from the traditions with which he was most familiar and in this sense his outlook was rather parochial. His time in Japan shook him up and surprised him with the revelation that such a remarkable civilization had stemmed from roots other than his own. This discovery created for him not exactly a crisis of faith but an arousal, a questioning about where the goodness of civilization comes from. Potok felt that God dwelt in Japan but wondered whether it was his God, another God or just a godly presence that can be felt in any true civilization. The difference is that Japan … is not being pushed by its elites to replace and even enlarge its population through an open-borders policy. After my recent visit to Japan, I think that I had a similar revelation.  Although my own Jewish upbringing was not nearly as formal as his, and though during my twenties I had become a rather secular Jew, over the years for reasons that I do not completely understand I came to appreciate the goodness that had flowed in making Western civilization from the Jewish tradition. (READ MORE from Max Dublin: A Passover in Japan) As I have written earlier, my early contact with Japanese culture was through its end products, its literature, art, cuisine, and tools. When in Japan I experienced the living civilization which had produced these marvelous artifacts and I was duly impressed. My sense of the possibilities of what the good life can look like expanded. I have always felt that there are many paths to God and while immersed in this culture it was inescapable to me that this was one of them. There is a Hebrew expression that encompasses this feeling, Zeh gam tov — this is also good. I have been told that that for the most part the Japanese are not religious but I’m not sure that I believe this, or, to be precise, exactly what this means. The dominant recognizable religion in Japan is Shintoism. Part of the Jewish tradition is living a rules-based orderly life and one can find these rules in the Hebrew Bible, especially in Leviticus. But one does not need a set of written rules, many of which are rather esoteric, in order to live a good life. Unwritten rules will do just as well. The heart of Shintoism has to do with living in harmony with one’s earthly cohabitants while cleanliness is also a leitmotif. There is no institutionalized religion in Japan like the dying institutionalized religion in the West but rather the values of Shintoism seem to have been internalized in the culture, these are the waters that the areligious Japanese swim in. And though there are no religious services such as we know them in the West there is some ritual, some prayers, although only of the petitionary kind. A person approaches a shrine within a temple, bangs a gong or rings a bell to awaken the god or get its attention, kneels, bows, and makes a wish, asks a special favor. And bear in mind that in the West, Jews, including Orthodox Jews, do not necessarily believe in God — I once read about a survey that found fully one-third of Orthodox Jews are not believers but they still practice their religion which exhorts them in so many ways to become disciplined and better people. Even in Israel, a highly secularized country, most Jews celebrate the holidays, keep kosher, and everyone seems to be always rushing around to help, to do mitzvot, good deeds. In this sense there is a common core of values between Jewish and Japanese civilization. It is interesting that Abraham Setsuzu Kotsuji, a former Shinto priest who wrote From Tokyo to Jerusalem, converted to Judaism due to the influence of reading the Book of Leviticus.  To me the most endearing thing about Japanese culture is that it is both backward and forward looking at the same time. The Japanese revere their traditions and you can see this in full display in the street. There are shops in all of the major cities that rent out kimonos and a Japanese couple out on the town will often rent them and wear them all day to enhance their experience. You see them unselfconsciously strolling down the street and popping into shops and restaurants and it’s not like a costume party and no one gives them a second glance except for people like me who admire how beautiful they look. On the other hand, they seamlessly incorporate all manner of high tech into their daily life, though they do not seem to be obsessively glued to their smartphones as do many Westerners. One of the most delightful experiences for me was visiting a pottery village in Kyoto. Every large Japanese city has a sizable cluster of pottery studios that produce and sell all manner of crockery and the variety of the products that are produced there is astonishing, I’ve seen nothing nearly close to it at any similar Western venue. At one of these studios a master potter gave a free demonstration. He was 95 years old and perfectly sound of hand and eye, and whipped off one type of vessel after the other — sake pitchers, teapots, teacups and so forth. After a piece was finished, he would cut it down the middle with a piece of wire to show the viewers the cross section and then carelessly bunch the thing up and toss it in a pail for future reference. He then showed us the glazing and firing facilities and made a point of telling us that the glaze that he used was a secret recipe which even at his venerable age he was not quite ready to pass on to the next generation. Trade secrets are an old tradition in the making of crafts and I cannot say whether they always really add a certain je ne sais quoi to the final product but they certainly do add cache. (READ MORE: A Very Unhappy Anniversary) Western pundits sometimes remark that Japan with an aging population and a low birth-rate is a dying civilization. In point of fact, it is no more aging and has no smaller a birth-rate than some European countries. The difference is that Japan, which does allow for some immigration mainly from east Asian countries, is not being pushed by its elites to replace and even enlarge its population through an open-borders policy. The most important thing is that it is maintaining its quality of life through orderly immigration policies. This is not xenophobia; it is simply self-preservation. Demographers claim that a low birth-rate eventually leads to extinction. But does anyone really believe that Japan is on a trajectory to merely poofing out? I for one certainly do not. In a famous lecture which pertained mainly to American foreign policy, Charles Krauthammer maintained that decline is an option rather than an inevitability. By all appearances Japan has chosen to flourish rather than to decline. The post Japan Steps Into the Light appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Watch & share this legendary broadcast! Alex Jones breaks down the ongoing attacks on Infowars. Patriots including Steve Bannon, General Flynn, Roger Stone and more rally to Infowars’ defense: Don’t miss: BREAKING: Deep State Attempted To Shut Down Infowars Headquarters Last Night