OrthodoxNet.com Blog

Wall Street Opinion Journal Brian M. Carney Tuesday, June 27, 2006

A dissonant note of moral equivalence at an exhibit on communist horrors.

ELLIS ISLAND, N.Y.–Tucked out of the way on the top floor of the main building here is a curious little traveling exhibit about the Soviet Gulag. On the day that I visited, no signs in the lobby of the Ellis Island Museum announced the presence of the exhibit; one happened upon it through determination or by chance, stepping with little warning from display cases devoted to the hopes of immigrants seeking freedom or opportunity in America into the hopeless deprivation and cruelty of Siberian death camps.

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From Gates of Vienna:

Führerbunker floor planFor the first time ever, Adolf Hitler’s underground hideaway, the infamous Führerbunker, is to be marked with a historical sign.

Construction of the Führerbunker, which was located beneath the garden of the Reichskanzlei (Reichschancellery) in Berlin, was completed in 1939, and the structure remained intact throughout the war.

Wall Street Opinion Journal Matthew Kaminksi June 10, 2006

Is Poland’s last communist leader an opportunist, cynic, or “evolutionary revolutionary”?

WARSAW–Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s last communist leader, is still fighting hard to shape history. Press any hot button and the general holds forth in long, clear, numbing sentences, as if back at a Party Plenum. Martial law imposed by him in the early hours of Dec. 13, 1981, to break Solidarity and Lech Walesa? That, he claims–as he has always done–”saved Poland” from the Soviets. His unswerving loyalty to Moscow and a decade of strongman rule? That paved the way for democracy. Gen. Jaruzelski’s self-obsession has filled several memoirs, including his Polish best-seller, “Martial Law: Why?” A man so closely associated with the darkest episodes in his nation’s recent past wants the future not so much to forgive him as to understand him–and even give him a little credit for a free, undivided Europe.

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Townhall.com Buchanan May 23, 2006

Yugoslavia is gone, forever. The country that emerged from World War I and Versailles as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, land of the South Slavs, has passed into history.

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Dhimmi Watch

The article is interesting in showing how St. George has been brought into English history and culture. Having said that, I don’t think the Orthodox will flinch under Muslim disapproval. I don’t know about the English, however.

Interfax News April 12, 2006

The history of relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian cosmonauts began at the moment when a human being was first launched into space. These relations developed even when the Soviet state waged an intensive struggle with religion. In recent years these relations have been given a special positive impulse. Some episodes in the cooperation between the Orthodox Church and Russian cosmonauts have been related to Interfax-Religion by one of its principal eyewitnesses, Colonel Valentin Petrov, associate professor at the Gagarin Air Force Academy.

JBL: It’s always interesting that controversial Christian historical topics are released at Easter (or Christmas).

San Francisco Chronicle John Noble Wilford, Laurie Goodstein April 7, 2006

An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years, and it portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus but as his favored disciple and willing collaborator.

In this text, scholars reported Thursday, the account of events leading to the Crucifixion differs sharply from the four Gospels in the New Testament.

Here Jesus was said to entrust Judas with special knowledge and ask him to betray him to the Roman authorities. By doing so, he tells Judas, “you will exceed” the other disciples.

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Reopens debate on war for ‘noble aim’ of regaining Holy Land for Christianity

WorldNetDaily.com March 25, 2006

Despite a 2000 request for “pardon,” widely interpreted as an apology to Muslims for the Crusades, by the late Pope John Paul II, the Vatican reopened the debate last week with a conference that characterized the wars fought centuries ago as defensive measures taken with the noble aim of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity, according to the London Times.

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Poland.pl 2006-03-09, 17:26

The Catholic Church in Poland has apologized for the harm caused by those priests who collaborated with the communist secret police.

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Jewish World Review Paul Johnson

One of the fascinating things about studying history is to see the way in which man’s extraordinary creative and inventive faculties are in a continual battle with his critical and destructive faculties. If only the first were in operation, humanity would have advanced far more rapidly. We’d now be enjoying living standards we won’t reach until 3000 to 4000. We’d be making regular trips to our solar system’s planets (and exploiting them) and possibly to the stars beyond.

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Los Angeles Times March 22, 2006

JOHN EVANS IS THE U.S. ambassador to Armenia, as of this writing. But he probably won’t be for long. Evans, a career diplomat who was selected to receive an American Foreign Service Assn. award last year for his frank public speaking, irked his superiors at the State Department by uttering the following words at UC Berkeley in February 2005: “I will today call it the Armenian genocide.” For that bit of truth-telling, Evans was forced to issue a clarification, then a correction, then to endure having his award rescinded under pressure from his bosses, and finally to face losing his job altogether.

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Jewish World Review Paul Johnson

The EU is built on fantasy.

One thing history teaches, over and over again, is that there are no shortcuts. Human societies advance the hard way; there is no alternative. Communism promised Utopia on Earth. After three-quarters of a century of unparalleled sufferings, the Soviet Union collapsed in privation and misery, leaving massive Russia with an economy no bigger than tiny Holland’s. We are now watching the spectacle of another experiment in hedonism, the European Union, as it learns the grim facts of life.

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Origins of Presentism, review by William Anthony Hay

Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism, and History, by J.C.D. Clark, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. 336 pp.

HISTORY RETAINS A PROFOUND HOLD on the human imagination as individuals and societies alike define themselves by coming to terms with their past. Today, however, a general shift in assumptions about the role of the past in the developed world has changed the relationship of cultures with their history. Events are now located only in the present tense. Having lost touch with a history that provided meaning, Western societies now grapple confusedly with questions of identity.

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Jerusalem Post ETGAR LEFKOVITS Jan. 24, 2006

In an unprecedented move, Israel’s top archaeological body is recommending that the Megiddo Prison be relocated due to the recent discovery of the most ancient Christian place of worship ever found in Israel on the grounds of the prison.

The ruins of the Christian prayer hall, which was located inside a Roman villa, date back to the first half of the third century CE, making the chapel the earliest place of Christian worship ever unearthed in the Holy Land, excavation director and Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Yotam Tepper said Tuesday.

The site in question, which is located between an ancient Jewish village dating back to the Roman period and what used to be a Roman Army camp, was uncovered last year after authorities sought to expand the prison grounds and prisoners stumbled upon the ruins during routine excavations.

The building, which is thought to have belonged to a Roman officer, has a rectangular hall with a mosaic floor bearing geometric patterns, a medallion decorated with drawings of fish - a symbol widely used in early Christianity - and three Greek inscriptions.

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“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

This famous quote was from British statesman Edmund Burke, who was born this day, January 12, 1729. Considered the most influential orator in the House of Commons, Burke stands out in history, for, as a member of the British Parliament, he defended the rights of the American colonies and strongly opposed the slave trade.

In “A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” 1791, Edmund Burke wrote:

What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without restraint. Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as they are disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

AmericanMinute.com

Jeffrey Hart offers a compelling assessment of modern conservativism in a Russel Kirkian vein. (Anyone familiar with Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” will appreciate the piece. Those unaware of Kirk will appreciate the introduction to him here .)

One area where Hart fails in his assessment of abortion. He does not see, it appears to me, that abortion is both a religious and political issue, or at least who politics and religion meet in any discussion of abortion, no matter what side of the question a person holds or what his religious ideas and beliefs might be.

The Wall Street Journal Jeffrey Hart December 30, 2005

Prudence, skepticism and “unbought grace.”

In “The Conservative Mind” (1953), a founding document of the American conservative movement, Russell Kirk assembled an array of major thinkers beginning with Edmund Burke and made a major statement. He proved that conservative thought in America existed, and even that such thought was highly intelligent–a demonstration very much needed at the time.

Today we are in a very different and more complicated situation. Nevertheless, a synthesis is possible, based on what American conservatism has achieved and left unachieved since Kirk’s volume. Any political position is only as important as the thought by which it is derived; the political philosopher presiding will be Burke, but a Burke interpreted for a new constitutional republic and for modern life. Here, then, is my assessment of the ideas held in balance in the American Conservative Mind today.

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MOSCOW, December 9 (RIA Novosti)

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Danish Ambassador to Russia discussed Friday the upcoming reburial of Emperor Alexander III’s wife, interred in Copenhagen after her death 77 years ago.

Alexy II and Per Carlsen agreed that the reburial of Empress Maria Fyodorovna (birth name Dagmar) next to the remains of her husband and other members of the Romanov dynasty would be a momentous event for both nations.

The governments of Russia and Denmark agreed earlier this year that the empress’ remains should be returned to St. Petersburg. They will be brought by ship September 24, 2006, and reburied two days later at the Peter and Paul Cathedral.
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American Minute December 7

“December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

Thus spoke President Franklin D. Roosevelt, following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by over 100 Japanese aircraft.

Five American battleships and three destroyers were sunk, 400 planes were destroyed and over 4000 were killed or wounded.

President Roosevelt concluded:

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory…Our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God.

(Note: The designers of the new WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C., chose not include the line “So help us God” from FDR’s address.)

American Minute

His death went unnoticed, as he died the same day John F. Kennedy was shot, but his works are some of the most widely read in English literature.

Originally an agnostic, he served in World War I and became a professor at Oxford and Cambridge.

He credits his Catholic friend and fellow writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “Lord of the Rings,” as being instrumental in bringing him to faith in Christ.

Among his most notable books are: The Screwtape Letters; Miracles; The Problem of Pain; Abolition of Man; and The Chronicles of Narnia, which include The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe.
His name was C.S. Lewis, born this day, November 29, 1898.

Over 200 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide and continue to sell at a rate of a million copies a year, even forty years after his death.

In his book “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis wrote:

“All that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

WorldNetDaily.com Jon Dougherty November 29, 2005

Expert says Chinese leader’s policies led to death of 77 million countrymen

A noted expert in calculating the number of deaths caused by authoritarian regimes says the late Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung’s policies and actions led to the deaths of nearly 77 million of his countrymen, surpassing those killed by Nazi Party founder Adolf Hitler and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin.

R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science and a Nobel Peace Prize finalist who has published dozens of books chronicling so-called “democide,” or death by government, said the new Chinese figure – nearly double his previous estimate of about 38 million – was based on what he believes was Mao’s duplicity in China’s great famine of 1958 to 1961.

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