Rod Dreher's Blog, page 130

The Future Right As Anti-Leftist

A reader writes:

I’m a Muslim reader who emailed you a few months ago. I’ve taken a break from reading all news because it’s so damn depressing, but I just read some of your articles about BLM and I’d like to share some stories about my upbringing and privilege.

I come from a wealthy Bay Area county with a large East Asian/Indian population involved with the tech industry. Like I said, wealthy. One of the wealthiest places in America. But because they come from immigrant backgrounds, a lot of my high school classmates are somehow convinced that they are persecuted. I once heard an Indian girl complain that “white men” control America and have all the success, and were the bane of her existence, apparently. I probably gave some derisive snort at the time, and got an angry response. Blacks and Latinos suffer gross and unjust discrimination in this country, but she was neither of those things, college-bound, with a bright and affluent career ahead of her, so what did that have to do with her *personally*? Meanwhile, these same people on a regular basis mock whites, Southerners, conservatives, Trump voters, Christians (or any type of religious people, really, remember atheism is chic), people with a fraction of the wealth and access to an education and comforted lifestyle as them.

Of course, there is no such thing as an individual anymore in this mode of thinking. You are defined by the amount of ticks you can check off on a list of ‘diverse’ characteristics. I am dark-skinned (check), have a minority religious affiliation (check), male (cross), heterosexual (cross), and have socially conservative views (triple cross). But of course, that’s not who I *am*. I know a man who is white, heterosexual, and has political beliefs that are squarely liberal. Recently, he’s started to get into anti-political correctness/right-wing stuff even though he hates Trump. Why? Because he knows that the Left *hates* people like him simply because of who he is.

I am also saddened by how many of my fellow Muslims I see falling into this type of left-wing, neo-Marxist thinking, simply because (on the surface) it seems friendly to us. Like all forms of Marxism, it’s rooted in atheistic materialism and a hostility to religious faith that routed the Muslim world in the 20th century. I’m not on social media anymore, but a friend of mine sent me tweets of Muslims condoning property destruction and looting in the wake of the George Floyd protests (Keep in mind, in Islam to die defending one’s property makes you a martyr).

Conservatives of all kinds are going to need to find allies in not the usual places — including among Muslims. It’s not 2002 anymore. Tyler Cowen, writing about the post-Trump intellectual Right, says:

Last and perhaps most significant, the intellectual right will dislike the left. It pretty much does already, but the antagonism will grow. Opposition to political correctness and cancel culture, at least in their left-wing versions, will become the most important defining view. As my colleague Bryan Caplan succinctly put it four years ago: “Leftists are anti-market. … Rightists are anti-leftist.”

The intensity of this dislike will mean that, within right-wing circles, free speech will prosper. As long as you take care to signal your dislike of the left, you will be allowed to hold many other heterodox views without being purged or penalized.

It is striking what does not make my list. Social conservatism animates many voters on the right, but it is less likely to influence the relatively elite right-wing intellectuals.

Read it all. I wish he weren’t correct about social conservatism, but he is. I believe the only viable way to fight for social conservative causes politically is through some form of anti-leftism. Anti-leftism is not the same thing as social conservatism, but the woke left is and is going to be a far greater threat to social and religious conservatives than anything the right is likely to come up with.

To be clear, this will be simply a matter of self-protection. As a social and religious conservative, I don’t believe there will be a meaningful place for people like me in post-Christian American politics. The most important political objective for my dwindling tribe in the years to come is going to be protecting individuals and institutions from the soft totalitarians of the left. (We can and should practice a more positive form of politics at the local level, as I describe in The Benedict Option ). It is interesting to read this Muslim reader’s e-mail about how wealthy ethnic and religious minorities in the Bay Area are using leftist themes to practice the politics of class, racial, and religious hatred, while signaling to others and to themselves that they are good progressives.

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Black Lives Matter: A Privileged Religion

Here’s the story:

Mayor Bill de Blasio is permitting Black Lives Matter protesters to continue marching through city streets while canceling all large events through September.

Speaking on CNN Thursday night, de Blasio said the demonstrators’ calls for social justice were too important to stop after more than a month of demonstrations have not led to an outbreak of coronavirus cases.

“This is a historic moment of change. We have to respect that but also say to people the kinds of gatherings we’re used to, the parades, the fairs — we just can’t have that while we’re focusing on health right now,” de Blasio told host Wolf Blitzer.

Observing the rites of the religion of Black Lives Matter is more important than anything else, because it is supreme. All the other city ethnic group gatherings and parades scheduled for this fall are banned, because of this deadly pandemic. But in Bill de Blasio’s New York, politicized black New Yorkers and their non-black allies are supreme. Their interests are more important than slowing down the spread of a pandemic. Not you Italians, with your San Gennaro Day — cancelled! — and not you West Indian Day celebrants; yes, you are black, but you are not politically black, so you don’t count.

For the record, I think the mayor is correct to cancel large events through September 30, in the interest of public health. But also for the record, let’s be clear that in New York City, at least, Black Lives Matter is a supremacist political religion.

I wonder what would happen if the San Gennaro organizers erected a magic circle of Black Lives Matters posters on the boundaries of Little Italy. Would that give them supernatural protection against the NYPD’s attempts to shut them down?

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Trump’s Stone-Cold Sleaze

It’s funny how news like Trump commuting Roger Stone’s sentence would normally be front-page, above-the-fold, banner headline stuff. But now, it’s just another day in the unraveling of the Trump administration.

You can think that the Russia investigation was a put-up job if you like — that’s fine. But there’s no denying that Roger Stone flagrantly lied to Congress about it, and threatened a witness — all to protect Donald Trump. And now Trump has demonstrated that if you lie to protect him, and get caught doing it, you won’t have to pay a price.

Roger Stone is a crook, and he won’t have to do a day in jail because Donald Trump believes those who serve him are above the law. Trump is fighting a steep uphill battle for re-election this fall, with GOP control of the Senate at risk. And he goes and does this. Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, which was a disgusting act, but at least he had the sense to do that on the way out the door, after the 2000 election, when it couldn’t hurt the party.

It is going to take a long time to get the Trump stink off the GOP. And here’s the thing: if Trump had done great things for the country, maybe, just maybe, things like this would be tolerable. Not excusable, not remotely excusable, but tolerable. But he didn’t. I don’t know that there has ever been a time in my life when the Democratic Party’s agenda has been more dangerous to core American values than now. And yet, look at Trump. This shambling, incompetent, self-dealing mess of a man is the only thing between us and the government falling into the hands of people who are going to do deep damage to the country.

The election will not turn on Roger Stone, who will be forgotten by next week, given the gravity and intensity of the news cycle. But it’s just one more damn thing that reveals Trump for who he is. Destiny gave Trump an opportunity to do important things, but he blew it, hard, as blowhards will.

I dread what the Biden Administration is going to do. I honestly do. The Democratic Party post-2016 is a different beast, and I expect aggressive wokeness to ride high and hard in the saddle. The only consolation for conservatives will be not having to be embarrassed and ashamed almost every day by the Republican president. It didn’t have to be like this. Or maybe it did, character being destiny and all.

Another consolation from what looks like an inevitable Trump loss: it will give the GOP four years to prepare for the 2024 election, which really will be a realignment contest. Either it will establish the progressive Democrats (as opposed to Clinton Democrats) as the dominant party for the foreseeable future, or it will mark the emergence of a muscular Republican populism — but this time, led by someone who is not corrupt, and who knows what he’s doing.

UPDATE: I should say that a lot can happen between now and November. The Democratic Party leaders clearly cannot bring themselves to criticize the woke mobs. Who knows what those mobs will do between now and Election Day? If Trump pulls this out because more Americans fear the Democrats than loathe Trump, that will be quite the thing, to put it mildly. But the next four years will be unbearable.

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More On Wokeness At West Point

Getting good letters on this one. If you haven’t read the original “Wokeness Comes To West Point” post, by all means do. Then read these letters.

Here’s the first, slightly edited to protect confidentiality:

I graduated from West Point in [date] and currently still serve.  I was dismayed, but honestly not very shocked, with the 40-page manifesto fired at the Academy by the disgruntled former cadets.  There has been a gradual shift at West Point in recent years to become more progressive, to include:

-In 2018, inviting Ta-Nehisi Coates to spend two days at the academy, speaking to cadets about a variety of topics, with an emphasis on race.  This is the same Ta-Nehisi Coates who wrote in regards to the police and firefighters who died on 9/11 “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature.”

-In 2017, Spenser Rapone, an avowed communist, was allowed to graduate from West Point.  On his way out, he ensured everyone knew his world views in the form of a Che Guevara t-shirt under his uniform and a “Communism Will Win” sign in the cap he threw upon graduation.

-This year, a “coalition” of graduates fired off a letter to the Class of 2020, blasting President Trump for “politicizing” the military in response to the protests, and urging them to question any orders that don’t fit their world view.

All of this is truly dangerous, as we are creating generations of entitled, embittered junior officers who will reflect those values and spread them within the Army.  As I read this list of grievances outlined in the manifesto, I kept asking myself “And then what happened?”  Dropping snippets from anonymous surveys with no context and no resolution does not, and will never prove systemic racism.  If some of the events did occur as stated, they are not remotely as terrible as the treatment of Henry O. Flipper, the first black graduate of West Point.  He was “silenced”, wherein no one would talk to him outside of official business, for his entire four years at the Academy.  He experienced true systemic racism, and he arrived on the other side.  These nine former cadets wouldn’t make it past R-Day.

From the top to the bottom, our military is rapidly losing its ability to make war in the name of progressivism.  This week, GEN Milley, the Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs, told Congress that bases named after Confederate generals needed to have their names changed as soon as possible.  I won’t attempt to unpack the history behind how Army bases received their names, but I will say it’s truly telling that GEN Milley chose to focus on that issue instead of addressing the Soldiers that recently died at Ft Hood (Vanessa Gillen & Gregory Morales, to name a few).  In an interview shortly after the death of George Floyd, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, Kaleth Wright, said his number 1 fear as the Air Force’s senior enlisted leader is receiving notice that one of his black airmen died at the hands of the police.  I would think his biggest fears might instead revolve around losing air superiority to China or the EMP threat to our satellites.

The military is trodding on dangerous ground when it ignores threats abroad in a misguided attempt to appease social justice.  Command teams posting social media articles and videos decrying racism within the ranks, as happened after George Floyd, are unnecessary and frankly insulting.  Treating the armed forces as if Jim Crow is still in full effect will only sow division, not heal it.  And unless senior leaders stop kowtowing to the mob, we are in for some very interesting times ahead on the world stage.

Here’s one from a current West Point professor, who asked me simply not to use his name:

Thank you for your article on “Wokeness Comes to West Point.” More broadly speaking, thank you for the perspectives you publish in The American Conservative. I frequently enjoy reading articles on your website, and I do my best to carefully think through the arguments presented. I know the authors certainly do their best to think carefully when writing them.

 

I have read through the open letter, “An Anti-Racist West Point”, and I have also read the updates to your article based on reader feedback. It is important that we have careful and honest discussions about where the political winds are pushing us whenever public discourse suggests deviating from the status quo. Edmund Burke would not have it any other way. I identify as a conservative, but it also feels to me like conservatism is in a bit of a civil war right now. That is part of the reason why I value The American Conservative so much. You provide thoughtful opinion pieces which help me more carefully consider the essence of conservatism and how conservatives can better serve others.

 

I will also add that I currently teach at West Point, and I have taught here since 2013. Prior to that, I led combat engineers in both Iraq and Afghanistan, having spent three years of my life between those two countries. Before I commissioned as an officer in the United States Army, I was first an enlisted Soldier. I mention my background only to say that I have some experience soldiering in the ranks, and I have some experience leading Soldiers. As such I have at least some idea of what it takes to do both. As I prepare to share my thoughts on “Wokeness at West Point”, please know that I do so in a personal capacity and that my thoughts reflect only what I see from my fighting position. I cannot speak for others at the academy or for the U.S. Army; I can only speak for myself.

 

With that preamble, let me begin with the bottom-line up front. West Point is not in danger of being overtaken by wokeness. We do have problems with racism, and we have work to do to overcome those problems. It is my opinion that our (West Point’s) problems of racism come from at least two places. First, West Point did at one time have overtly racist policies. Second, West Point is comprised of officers, non-commissioned officers, civilians, and cadets from all 435 legislative districts, and we bring with us attitudes as diverse as our beloved country itself. Some of those attitudes, unfortunately and to our own injury, are racist. The legacy of racism, baked into our institution, combined with conscious and unconscious racism among people like me and the people I serve with, erodes trust between all of us. When trust is low, morale suffers. When morale suffers, our fighting force is less effective. Queue Napoleon, “The moral is to the physical as three to one.” Racism, sexism, whatever immoral -ism you describe, is a form of fratricide because it diminishes the effectiveness of our fighting force. I observed it in the ranks when I was enlisted, and I have seen it as an officer. We have all seen how toxic leaders and toxic teammates can ruin group cohesion and trust. Racism is another toxin capable of doing the same if left unchecked. West Point is reckoning with the remnants of its officially sanctioned racist past, and it is dealing with racist attitudes that walk through its gates every day.

 

Having said that, I stand behind all the men and women at this institution. Like all people, we are imperfect. Yet we strive to think critically and ask how we can improve at all we are called to do. Our instruction to cadets is both abstract and practical. We emphasize character development, and we also teach cadets how to close with and destroy the enemy in close combat. Many cadets will go on to lead Soldiers in combat after they graduate. 13 of my West Point classmates paid the ultimate price while doing the same. I have been wounded in combat myself. Another classmate was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for valor. Rest assured, West Point’s focus on leading with character does not come at the expense of creating tough leaders. When it is their time to serve, our cadets will have no trouble dominating any firefight in which they find themselves. Our Army has no trouble winning battles; we have problems winning wars. Why we can do the former and not the latter is a separate discussion, but I mention it because there is some misconception that by caring about justice and equality, our officers are somehow less capable of killing other human beings. The ability to do both is not mutually exclusive, and I assure you that our Army is incredibly lethal.

 

I have to say that my reaction to “An Anti-Racist West Point” was not as strong as yours or the reader who shared with you the open letter. While I am a conservative, I do not feel that a left-wing mob is descending on West Point. I do not feel forced to bow to the woke cult. What I read in the open letter was indeed strongly worded. It does not go so far as to call for a reorientation of West Point’s mission in my opinion, but it is a call to do a lot of things differently. To attempt to do most of the things suggested would be a tremendous undertaking in a place that values tradition as much as we do. To even attempt to add or subtract a mandatory math class from the curriculum is as challenging as cold fusion, so you could imagine the energy involved in doing some of the things proposed in the open letter. Having said that, we owe it to our country to create an environment where the very best of its sons and daughters can come study to be war fighters and uniformed servants to the nation without the distraction and pollution of racism. The open letter is one attempt at helping West Point’s leaders consider how we might do that. There will be other efforts as well, and we will move forward, slowly and ploddingly like we always do.

 

To address your points, I do not think China’s military is knotted up over ableism. I do not think the authors of the open letter are either. They are simply asking us to think more carefully about how our actions may be inequitable, either intentionally or unintentionally. What’s the harm in thinking? What’s the harm in stepping outside of oneself and thinking about what life might look like through the eyes of another? As a leader of Soldiers from all walks of life, I actually find that to be a useful skill. It helps you understand and connect with your Soldiers, most of whom are going to be a lot different than you.

 

I am still working out my thoughts on racist v. anti-racist. It feels too much like “You are for terror or against terror and if you don’t join us in this war, then you are for terror.” To me it feels too simplistic. Perhaps there are other ways to fight racism than a frontal assault. Perhaps we can find an assailable flank and attack there. I also recognize that the I might be wrong. Perhaps I have been too passive against racism. As I reflect on my time leading Soldiers, I think I have done a good job of dealing with racism in my platoon and company, but perhaps I could have done something more effective. I do know that unintentional racism did negatively impact morale in the organizations I led. Perhaps if I were anti-racist, I could have dealt with that more effectively. Again, what is the harm in thinking about that? I suspect I am not going to be won over by critical race theory, but if West Point automatically skews white and conservative, what is the harm in providing more academic balance in the classroom by including perspectives that are more liberal and written by minorities? Why not prepare our graduates to help identify and sort through racism be exposing them to a broader range of perspectives in an academic setting? They are going to encounter racism in the Army; shouldn’t they have as many tools as possible with which to deal with it? Please don’t worry, no one from “the Woke” is would be teaching a class that covers these topics anyway.

 

2LT Shaeffer’s comments about not understanding microaggressions may seem like fluff on the surface, but it is rooted in a desire to engender trust and foster a climate of respect. At the end of the day, that is what this is all about – helping one another learn how to be professional and respectful, thereby building trust. I am sure it would not surprise you to hear that fighting effectively in close combat requires extraordinary amounts of trust. Microaggressions, or any other form of racism, erode that. One incident doesn’t. Neither does a second incident. When we are talking about preparing Soldiers to fight in combat, however, why would one want to permit any actions that could chip away at trust? Our history as an integrated Army is instructive in this regard. Look no further than U.S. forces in the Vietnam War to see how America’s problems with racism impacted morale and the ability of Soldiers to trust one another and fight effectively in combat.

 

It is not my place to comment on whether the policy proposals made by these young officers are prudent. I have full faith and confidence in Lieutenant General Williams to take the steps necessary to keep West Point moving in the right direction with respect to stamping out racism while simultaneously ensuring cadets are prepared to be Second Lieutenants in the U.S. Army (also not mutually exclusive). I certainly do not understand all the positions the authors take, and there are many instances where I see things differently. Some of the narratives offered (shiny shoes) are not compelling to me. I feel no harm in thinking more carefully about what they wrote, however, and about how I as a leader can create a fairer and more equitable environment. Rest assured; I will still be a hard ass. I will still create stress for my cadets through the rigor of my instruction in the classroom, through my enforcement of disciplinary standards, and through the training I provide in the field. I will still make my cadets do pushups when they fail to pay attention in class, and I will do pushups with them while continuing to lecture. All the same, why should it pain me as an officer to think about how I could be a better human being and a more effective at building trust with those who are not like me? It doesn’t matter that I am a Major, and the officers are Lieutenants. If someone is showing me ways in which I may be coming up short as a leader, it is my responsibility to carefully consider how I might improve. I should be thankful that they care enough to do so.

At a minimum, ”An Anti-Racist West Point,” is a starting point for a discussion on how we can make West Point a place that creates graduates who are increasingly more capable of building and maintaining trust amongst the Soldiers they lead. We already do a great job preparing them to build lethal formations through difficult training, and we train them to lead those formations of America’s sons and daughters in close combat. What is the harm in taking things to the next level by working to eliminate racism, thereby creating an even more professional and respectful environment, one where trust and faith in leaders is even higher and where Soldiers will go to even greater lengths to fight for their country?

 

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Transgenders In Space

In a thread to another post, a reader commented:

I have followed NASA’s efforts recently, and it is no wonder why they are having trouble getting into space again. All of the videos they put out are soooo politically correct. They must overrepresent women, and pretend that all space achievements are done by women. When interviewing the teams that land a rover on Mars, women are over represented and you get the idea that women are doing all the serious work at NASA. This comes from the 8 years of the Obama administration. They are now one big Social Justice organization.

I don’t know about that; I don’t follow any of it. But the reader’s comment reminded me of  a letter I received earlier this summer from a reader who works at NASA (I checked out the reader’s background to see what s/he does at NASA). The reader said that NASA campuses (e.g., the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena) have been having Pride Month activities that seem silly, maybe, but haven’t touched on science. It was mostly stuff like this:

But one event — this one also, as it happens, at JPL — really concerned this reader, who wrote about a presentation by one Adriana Knouf. The reader writes of concern that wokeness is bleeding over into science in a detrimental way:

One would assume the Adriana is giving a talk to the San Francisco transcendental poets collective, but no, it’s at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NASA has always been a progressive place; it comes with the territory of believing in the transcendence of Man through technology and scientific discovery—it’s NASA’s main tenet, really. But this? Science is compromised.

Here’s what transgendered Adriana Knouf’s presentation at JPL was about: “Imagining Transgender/Non-Binary People In Space”:

Abstract: As far as we know, there have been no transgender people in space. Yet transgender people—as well as others who engage in extensive body modification necessary for survival, such as disabled folx—might be the most suited for space travel given our somatic experiences of deep xenological transformations. Such transformations will likely be required for survival and thriving both in extraterrestrial as well as future terrestrial environments. Speaker and Xenologist Adriana Knouf will explore these issues through projects in her newly launched tranxxeno lab, a nomadic artistic research laboratory that investigates the productive entanglements between entities trans and xeno.

The first project, “TX-1”, launched fragments of Knouf’s hormone replacement medications to the International Space Station and marked the first-known time that elements of the transgender experience orbit the earth. “TX-1” ultimately safely returned to the surface of the earth. This was a symbolic exodus from a planet that is often inhospitable to us, yet its return was a sign of resilience. Knouf also started a new project, tentatively entitled “Xenological Entanglements: 001. Plurigenesiology”, that explores the production of exogenous estradiol in microgravity conditions. These projects lead us to consider the audacity of queer and transgender futures in space, questions of more-than-human enhancement that connect to the historical legacy of the cyborg. They are also part of Knouf’s research into xenology, or the study, analysis, and development of the strange, the alien, the other. Alongside these projects and concepts, she will also interweave important aspects of her experiences with queerness and transness that are fundamentally intertwined with her work.

Speaker Bio:

Adriana Knouf, Ph.D. (she/her/hers, sie/hir/hirs) works as a xenologist and as an artist-scientist-writer-designer-engineer. She engages with topics such as space art, satellites, radio transmission, non-human encounters, drone flight, queer and trans futurities, machine learning, the voice, and papermaking. She is the founding facilitator of the tranxxeno lab, a nomadic artistic research laboratory that promotes entanglements amongst entities trans and xeno.

Knouf is also an Assistant Professor of Art + Design at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. She is the author of “How Noise Matters to Finance” (2016) and numerous other journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers dealing with topics as varied as bioart, queer and trans existences, papermaking and electronics, weird temporalities, radio, and surveillance. She has been selected for a number of prestigious residencies, including a Biofriction residency (SI), participation in Field_Notes (FI), and a project at the Wave Farm (US). Her past work has been recognized by a number of awards, including as a prize winner in The Lake’s Works for Radio #4 (2020) and an Honorary Mention by Prix Ars Electronica in 2005.

Fascinating. So, fifty-one years after Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon, humanity has sent a transgendered person’s hormone replacement meds into space.

What does it mean that NASA hosts presentations by drag queens talking about their romps in the woods, and lectures from promoters of “entanglements amongst entities trans and xeno”? Serious question. One can easily imagine lectures about LGBT scientists and their lives and work, but this? What does it mean? I’m not asking rhetorically. Is there any deeper meaning to it? The reader said s/he is worried that the Knouf presentation compromises science. What do you think?

UPDATE: A reader points out that rocket scientist Jack Parsons, a founder of JPL, was a sex cultist and black magic practitioner who was involved in occult circles with L. Ron Hubbard.

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Hawley Vs. The NBA

Sen. Josh Hawley sent a letter to the NBA Commissioner protesting the league’s decision to allow its players to wear woke slogans on their jerseys, but not speak a word of protest on behalf of those persecuted by communist China. From his letter:

More:

Good for him!

A very woke reporter for the very woke ESPN was not so impressed. Adrian Wojnarowski, a top ESPN basketball analyst, responded to Hawley:

 

Wojnarowski subsequently apologized. Still, I appreciated that Sen. Hawley is smoking these hypocrites out. Black lives may matter to the NBA, but Uighur lives do not.

Remember how Saints quarterback Drew Brees got piled on for saying that he believes in standing for the National Anthem, and how he raced to apologize, and to say that yes, Black Lives Matter? Compare that to what happened to the Eagles’ DeSean Jackson, who posted grotesquely anti-Semitic content on his social media account (and later apologized). The disgusting actions of Jackson, who is black, were treated as not that big a deal in sports and media circles. White-guy Brees, though, was treated as History’s Greatest Monster simply for saying that he preferred to stand for the National Anthem, as a matter of patriotism.

We are learning a great deal about the true beliefs of the American corporate and media elites, are we not?

UPDATE: This is the latest:

Don’t make @wojespn apologize. He’s just saying what he really thinks. Call out the @NBA. You know, your job https://t.co/qLX5VsdO6R

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 10, 2020

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The Ottomans Are Back

We knew this was coming:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ordered the Hagia Sophia museum, one of Istanbul’s most famous landmarks, to be converted into a mosque.

He made the announcement hours after a top court cleared the way for him to make the change.

The Hagia Sophia, a major draw for tourists, has a long and complicated history. The architectural marvel was built as a church by the Byzantines in the 6th century and then converted to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

In 1934, Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s cabinet decreed that it be turned into a museum. It is widely regarded as a symbol of peaceful religious coexistence.

It is impossible to overstate to Americans how offensive and painful this is to Orthodox Christians. Imagine if St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome had been captured by the Ottomans and turned into a mosque. Imagine that for some decades, it had been declared a museum, as a gesture of religious coexistence. You couldn’t pray there as a Christian, but neither was it a Muslim house of prayer. Rather, it was a neutral space. Not ideal, not by a long shot, but tolerable. And now this.

This is not a new wound. The great and glorious church has not been a Christian house of worship since the Ottomans overthrew the Byzantine empire — with a single exception. In 1919, with Istanbul under occupation after the end of World War I and the fall of the Ottomans, a Greek Orthodox priest and a handful of Greek officers rowed ashore and made their way to the Hagia Sophia, where they celebrated the first Divine Liturgy there in nearly five centuries. More:

The Greek men entered Hagia Sophia with great reverence and crossed themselves. Papa Lefteris is then said to have whispered with great emotion: “I will enter into Your house, and I will venerate towards Your Holy Temple with fear…” (from Psalm 5, verse 7 in the Old Testament).

Father Eleftherios moved quickly, identifying the location of the Sanctuary and the Holy Altar. Finding a small table, he put it into place, then opened his bag and took out everything needed for the Divine Liturgy. Then he put on his stole and began, saying:

“Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and forever, and unto the ages of ages.”

“Amen,” responded Major Liaromatis, and the Divine Liturgy at Hagia Sophia, the first one to have taken place in nearly 500 years, commenced.

The group of Greeks crossed themselves with devotion, still unable to believe that they were inside Hagia Sophia, centuries after it had fallen into the hands of Muslims. And most importantly, they were even taking part in a Divine Liturgy in the most sacred place of Orthodoxy.

The Liturgy went on as normal. After 466 years, Hagia Sophia was serving again as a temple of Christianity, the sounds of Greek psalms echoing against its sacred walls.

Papa Lefteris read the Gospel for that day, while the Epistle was read by Brigadier Frantzis. The duties of the sacristan were performed by Lieutenant Nicholas.

Meanwhile, Turks had started entering the Church. They apparently simply could not fathom what was happening before their eyes. Father Eleftherios continued the liturgy completely unperturbed.

The Turks watched in silence, still unable to grasp at that point what was actually taking place inside the Church.

Papa Lefteris placed the antimension on the table, to do the Proskomidi. He then took a small Holy Chalice out of his bag, as well as a paten, a knife and a small prosphoron with a small bottle of wine.

With sacred emotion and devotion, the priest performed the Proskomidi. When that was completed, he turned to Lieutenant Nicholas and told him to light a candle so he could follow him during the Great Entrance. The young Lieutenant went ahead and lit the candle, while behind him the priest intoned the prayer: “May the Lord God remember all of us….”

More Turks had entered Hagia Sophia during the Proskomidi, and the atmosphere was beginning to change. At the same time, Greeks from Constantinople had started filing into the Church as well. They followed the remaining of the Liturgy with devotion, but as discreetly as possible, for fear of the Turks.

When the Liturgy reached its most sacred point – the Anaphora – Father Noufrakis said with an emotional voice: “Your own of Your own, we offer to You, for all and through all.” The officers knelt and the voice of Major Liaromatis could be heard chanting: “We sing to You, we bless You, we thank You, Lord, and we pray to You, our God.”

After a short while, the bloodless sacrifice of Christ was completed in Hagia Sophia, after 466 long years.

It was followed by the “Axion Estin,” the “Our Father,” and the words “With the fear of God, faith and love draw near,” when all the officers approached to commune from the Immaculate Mysteries.

Papa Lefteris quickly said the Communion prayers while Liaromatis chanted: “Blessed be the Name of the Lord…,” while all the rest of the officers received Holy Communion. The priest then told Lieutenant Nicholas, “Gather everything quickly and put it in the bag,” before saying the prayers of the Dismissal.

The Divine Liturgy in Hagia Sophia was now completed. It was a tremendous feat of courage that most Greeks couldn’t even begin to dream of.

Read it all.

Today’s move by Erdogan is solely an act of cultural triumphalism. There are no shortages of mosques in Istanbul. There are very few Greek Christians left in Istanbul these days. This is Erdogan rubbing the noses of Christians in our defeat. It is a fact of history — a sad fact, perhaps, but a fact — that conquerors often seized the conquered’s houses of worship, and turned them into temples of the conquerors’ religion. The ancestors of Christians and Muslims are both guilty of this. If we start pulling at those historical threads, there will be no end to recriminations. I’m not for it.

That said, what Erdogan has done today is infuriating and deeply offensive. For almost a century, the Hagia Sophia has been a neutral space. Almost nobody alive today has any memory of it as a place as Islamic worship.

If you are not religious, you should still worry about what’s going to happen to the Hagia Sophia. Its Muslim conquerors covered up the church’s Byzantine mosaics, but they didn’t destroy them. After it was turned into a museum by Ataturk, the mosaics were unveiled so visitors could appreciate the art. And now? I can easily imagine that devout Muslims would want these images covered now that the building was once again a Muslim house of worship. If this happens, then the aesthetic and historical loss to the world will be severe.

What does Erdogan gain from it? This is an empty Make Turkey Great Again gesture — one that does absolutely nothing to improve the lot of the Turkish people, but stands to alienate Turkey even more from the West (though less than it ought to do, given how alienated Westerners are from our own history and religion). Russia will not take this lying down. The West (minus Greece) might not care about the Hagia Sophia, but I suspect that won’t be the case for Russia.

I visited the Hagia Sophia once, about 12 or 13 years ago. It is an overwhelming experience, and was for me especially, given that I was newly Orthodox. I prayed quietly in the church — unobtrusively, out of respect for the space’s neutrality — and tried to imagine what it was like when it was filled with believers, worshipping. It’s hard to fathom the sense of loss, and of longing.

Here’s an NPR story from earlier this year about how scientists and singers have been able to recreate the sound of Christian liturgical chanting in the Hagia Sophia. Given the echo in the vast space, the challenges to liturgical chanters were massive. Now, though, through technology, we can recreate what that special sound was like. Listen, here it is:

It’s like the very stones and arches and domes proclaim the glory of God. Or rather, proclaimed.

What Erdogan did today is an act of naked cultural aggression. Turkey must be made to pay a price. Yet I feel it important to say that Christians should by no means hold all Muslims responsible for what the strongman of Ankara has done. I fear that at least some Christians who until today would not have known the Hagia Sophia from a Howard Johnson’s will take this as an excuse to carry out acts of spite against Muslims. Don’t do it. But this ought to put an end, once and for all, to attempts like the Spanish Muslim campaign to convince the Catholic Church in Spain to allow Muslims to do Islamic prayer in the Cathedral in Cordoba, which was used as a mosque under Moorish occupation.

The post The Ottomans Are Back appeared first on The American Conservative.

Wokeness Comes To West Point

I received the following e-mail today from an alumnus of the United States Military Academy at West Point. I am redacting the reader’s name to protect privacy:

I hate to pile on to the theme of academics at prominent universities attempting to shut down intellectual inquiry in the name of anti racism, but this is another example of the trend that needs some wider exposure.  The Left wing mob is coming for the service academies, and by extension, our nation’s very ability to defend itself from external enemies.  As a West Point graduate (class of 2017) and a longtime reader of your blog, I thought I should bring this to your attention as yet another example of the madness that is afflicting our country’s elite classes.

This letter needs some background explanation.  It’s not like the Princeton Putsch that you described.  The faculty at West Point are probably the most conservative of any public university in the country.  I can attest to the academic openness and respect for free debate during my time at the school (2013-2017).  The student body is (or was) generally conservative in an institutional sense.  They are not right-wing fire-breathers.  Cadets were pretty evenly divided about Donald Trump’s election.  From what I could observe, so were the faculty.  The Academy’s response to the unrest that has torn the United States apart in the last few months–spearheaded, I might add, by Lieutenant General Darryl Williams, the Academy’s first black Superintendent–was measured and appropriate for the amount of division in our country.  This is not an attempt by people currently in power to shut down debate by other academics.

It is quite the opposite.  It is an effort by young leaders in the United States Army to force the Academy to bow to the Woke Cult and make the Anti-Racism the central feature of the Academy’s curriculum. This policy statement was apparently drafted by a group of recent Academy graduates (classes of 2018 and 2019).   These graduates all came from the top tier of the ranks of the Academy’s cadet leaders.  Two recent valedictorians and First Captains signed this manifesto.  (Other past First Captains include Douglas MacArthur, John J. Pershing, and William C. Westmoreland.)  The other cadets all held high-ranking positions within the Corps of Cadets.  They are the cream of the crop of the Army’s future leaders, the guys and gals that will become generals one day and will be expected to lead America’s sons and daughters in combat.

Their actions are akin to those of the Red Guards in Maoist China.  They are agitating to tear the Academy apart from the ground up and reorient its mission around Anti-Racism.  The fact that our country’s future leaders believe in this nonsense is a sign that our military is in trouble, and cannot be relied upon either to defend our country or to safeguard the interests of all Americans in the performance of their duties.

I don’t expect you to read this entire document or understand completely what’s going on here, but the plain English of it is easy enough for everyone to understand.  Even so, I’ll add in a few notes for context on this document.

I knew some of these cadets personally and professionally in the performance of my duties, but not well enough to be able to speculate about their motives.  The document is filled with concrete policy proposals to address what its authors see as a major problem at West Point.  The effect of these policy proposals is to cede control of the Academy’s entire curriculum from the ground up to black cadets in the name of Anti-Racism.  It is replete with so-called ‘examples’ of racism at the Academy, but most fall apart on close inspection.  Minimally they do not substantiate the charge that West Point needs to be fundamentally reformed to address it.  I interpret most of these anecdotes as pure innuendo and hearsay, totally devoid of context, and not indicative of an institutional problem (they were nearly all sourced from an online anonymous survey).  They would not pass muster for any journalist attempting to investigate them.  It is filled with buzzwords about ‘heteronormativity’, ‘Protestants’, ‘imperialism’, ‘Christianity,’ ‘white supremacy’, ‘Black bodies,’ and the like. I doubt that the writers of this document know anything at all about any of these things, but of course that will not abate their righteousness in pursuit of their holy cause.

This document as a whole constitutes wholesale moral blackmail of the Academy, its graduates, and its present-day leadership.  It consists almost entirely of a recitation of black grievances against whites, with a few token gestures to ‘Latinx’ and ‘Asian’ minorities, but nothing more, probably because it didn’t occur to the writers of this document that there might be more to American history than their single-minded focus on racism.  I should note that the Academy is currently led by a black man (LTG Williams, himself a graduate with many years of honorable service) and that the Corps of Cadets itself has been led by black people (Simone Askew in 2018 and EJ Coleman in 2016) twice in the last five years.  Black cadets are represented at the Academy in greater numbers than their proportion of the population.  Of course, none of this is enough for the Woke Mob.

Do not take comfort in the security which has hitherto been afforded to our nation by our armed forces. We have not been tested against a real enemy in many generations.  When we are, leaders like this will not be able to stand in the field of battle.  You have been warned.

The reader attached a 40-page formal proposal, which you can read in its entirety here. The submission has set off a “comprehensive review of all matters involving race” by the West Point’s Inspector General’s Office, according to Army Times. Here’s the cover letter for the proposal:

And here is a summary of their demands:

I encourage you to read the whole thing. I have a few comments on the text.

This jumped out at me in the signatories’ opening remarks:

Though our recommended actions carry applicability in eradicating many forms of bias and discrimination at West Point, such as sexism, ableism, fatphobia, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, and classism, the remainder of this proposal will focus on addressing anti-Black racism as a first step on a long journey—a journey toward an anti-racist West Point.

It is amazing to me that the rising generation of the nation’s military elites have swallowed grievance culture. Do you think the cadets at China’s equivalent of West Point are knotted up over “ableism,” “transphobia,” and “fatphobia” in their ranks?

2) The more you read, the more you realize that these cadets’ minds have been colonized by an ideological virus. To read about individual cadet’s professed experiences of racism at West Point is painful — if they’re telling the truth. The answer to that is to find out who harassed them racially, and hold that person or those people accountable. The answer is to make it clear that there will be consequences for mistreating people on the basis of race. But that’s not good enough. According to the critical theory mind virus,  if you are not affirmatively “antiracist,” then you favor “white supremacy.” What is “antiracism”? Ibram X. Kendi, the lead advocate of “antiracism” and author of How To Be Antiracist, defines it like this:

The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “anti-racist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it.

James Lindsay breaks this down:

This definition, which does not merely mean “against racism,” as one might assume of the term, is absolutely standard in Social Justice. In fact, it reflects the core tenet of critical race Theory that racism is ordinary and pervades everything. As may be seen in Kendi’s use of the word “inequities,” antiracism is to be thought of in terms of equity, not equality.

In critical race Theory, it is simply impossible for racism to be absent from any situation. One may be actively racist by perpetuating racial prejudice and discrimination against non-white people (particularly black people), or passively racist by failing to notice racism in oneself or others and thus failing to address it. Both of these are bad. One can only be “antiracist” by noticing racism all the time, in every person and every situation, even when it is not readily apparent (or a fair reading of the situation—see also, close reading and problematizing), and “calling it out.” This is understood to have the effect of making racism visible to everyone and enabling it to be dismantled (see also, consciousness raising, critical consciousness, and wokeness).

The identification of racism against non-white people in any situation is always possible and rarely, if ever, falsifiable because it does not have to be intentional or conscious (see also, impact versus intent). For example, if a black customer and a white customer entered a store at the same time, and the white sales assistant approached the white customer to offer help first, this could be identified as racism because it prioritized the white person’s needs (see also, centering). However, if the sales assistant approached the black customer first, this could also be identified as racism because it could be read as indicating a distrust of black people and unwillingness to have them browse the shelves unsupervised. The shop assistant’s perception of her own motivations are irrelevant, and, to be a conscientious antiracist, she would need to admit her racism and pledge to do better.

In fact, the antiracism approach would start from the following assumption, as phrased by critical race educator Robin DiAngelo (author of White Fragility): “the question is not ‘did racism take place?’ but rather, ‘how did racism manifest in this situation?’” (Source.) As such, the racism of the shop assistant in the preceding example—and, more specifically, the racism underlying and defining her interactions with the customers—is fully assumed, though probably hidden (see also, mask).

Antiracism is the name for the practice she is expected to undertake under a Critical Social Justice paradigm in order to critically examine herself, the interaction, her past behaviors, her privilege and positionality within society (and its relevance—see also, intersectionality), as well as her motivations (including, especially, unconscious ones), and to find that racism and then abhor it so that she might fulfill her pledge to “do better.” To fail to do this is taken as a form of complicity—another manifestation of her racism—which is in need of critical examination under an antiracism program, and is very deeply Theorized as such (see also, white equilibrium, white fragility, white comfort, white innocence, white ignorance, racial contract, anti-blackness, active ignorance, pernicious ignorance, willful ignorance, false consciousness, and internalized dominance).

The thing you have to understand is that “antiracism” is not what you think it is! It is an Orwellian construct under which an incredibly destructive ideology travels. To repeat: if you are against racism, that doesn’t make you an “antiracist.” You have to be against racism in exactly the way they tell you to be. 

3) Check this out:

Require that humanities and social science courses add lessons and blocks of instruction dedicated to teaching the history and writings of marginalized people. This includes discussing not only Black history, but the history of Latinx, Asian, and other ethnic identity groups in this country. This includes discussing the history and impact of colonization on countries across the world and the United States’ role in imperialism. These lessons must center the work of marginalized groups to ensure their experiences are accurately understood by students. Require each course director to publish proofs that there are no Black scholars in their spaces if they choose to reference none.

I’m actually not against instruction teaching to future military leaders the negative effects of US colonialist policies, but I do not in any way, shape, or form trust the Woke to give a fair, balanced, accurate portrayal of this.

4) Ashley Salgado, one of the signatories, writes that she

looked to my Commander for guidance on how to address recent events in our formation. Though his remarks were genuine, they closed the conversation to any further discussion. He urged our Soldiers to remember the uniform they wear, as if to insinuate that they had to mute their voices because of the U.S. Army insignia on our chests.

Well, yes, you do have to mute your voice at some point because you are a soldier, and soldiering requires deep bonding. If I were a Russian or Chinese psyops officer, I could think of no better way to destroy US military cohesion than to encourage its officer corps to immerse themselves in critical theory and grievance.

Again, I encourage you to read the entire proposal on your own. I have no idea how representative it is of the way most cadets at West Point think about all this. People who are closer to West Point than I are in a better position to judge the accuracy of the West Point reader’s claim that the letter’s signatories “are agitating to tear the Academy apart from the ground up and reorient its mission around Anti-Racism.” But if you know anything about the ideology of antiracism, and how protean it is, morphing to encompass all aspects of life, you cannot possibly be sanguine about its manifestation among leading cadets at West Point.

Here, from the long letter, is a section by 1st Lt. Joy Schaeffer, lamenting that she was not indoctrinated into antiracist ideology by West Point:

The extent to which West Point fails to prepare white Cadets to understand racism and white

supremacy is acutely evident in my experience there as a white woman. Although I graduated as the

valedictorian of my class, I left woefully unprepared to create inclusive environments in future

diverse teams.

I graduated having learned about the importance of diversity and inclusion, but never about the

difference between them. I thought simply having people of many backgrounds was enough to

satisfy both. I didn’t understand the effort required as a leader to ensure that Black service members

feel valued, included, and heard, without having to minimize their Blackness.

I graduated without an understanding of how racism differs from prejudice, or the extent to which

racism is exacerbated by systems of power.

I graduated without an understanding of how I could still be racist, despite my best intentions and

the fact that I have always espoused the equality of all people.

I graduated with a degree in history without understanding the straight line that runs directly from

slavery through sharecropping, lynching, mass incarceration, and police brutality.

I graduated celebrating “how far we’ve come” instead of recognizing “how far we have to go.”

I graduated knowing that my whiteness is a culture, but still oblivious to the ways in which it

structures my interactions with people of color.

I graduated without an understanding of how to identify and call out microaggressions, and that my

silence in the wake of them enables greater acts of racism.

I graduated without an understanding of how to sensitively engage in discussions about the

discrimination experienced by Black people in the Army.

I graduated understanding the concept of white privilege, but not about the specific ways in which it

actively and passively contributes to the continued marginalization of people of color.

I graduated with an expectation that Black people should educate me on racial matters, without

knowledge of how this sense of entitlement to Black labor is premised on my white privilege.

I graduated having learned about the historic “white man’s burden,” but without uprooting my own

white savior complex.

I graduated aware of implicit biases, but not of how they contribute directly to the same systemic

racism that killed George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and too many

others.

I graduated without ever hearing the term “anti-racism.”

She is angry that West Point didn’t teach her how to identify and stand up to microaggressions. This woman, who will presumably be responsible for leading troops in some capacity into battle, is aggrieved by microaggressions. It boggles the mind. What she and her fellow signatories are calling for is political commissars at West Point. In the Red Army, “political commissars” were the officers who maintained political control and indoctrination within military units.

You know how conservatives like to reassure themselves that the US military is a basically conservative institution, and that it will in some sense defend ordinary people from woke militants if they were ever to come to power in the US Government? Wonder what those people think about this 40-page challenge to West Point authorities, from within the cadet corps. While West Point’s Inspector General is looking into the charges of systemic racism at West Point, I hope he is also planning to look into the extent to which the cadet corps is being subverted by this toxic ideology. I know it’s a lot to expect from members of Congress, but it would be nice to hear from them that they are concerned about West Point producing not warriors capable of defending America, but Social Justice Warriors divided against their country and themselves.

UPDATE: I can’t quit laughing at the idea that a person who went to the US Military Academy to be trained in the fine art of making war is bitching because they didn’t teach her how to spot microaggressions.

UPDATE.2: Reader Jakob Knickerbocker says to relax:

As usual, readers of this blog are overreacting. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen: The left-tenant signatories above are going to go to their respective platoons and find that most of their Soldiers (and especially their platoon sergeants, with 10+ years in) don’t give two s***’s about their feelings, don’t have respect for the fact that they graduated West Point and aren’t impressed by the fact that they were “student OIC of rugby” or whatever it was they did. For all that, they above signatories will also find that part of their job is looking for the virtues in Flyover Country specialists when they have to recommend them for Army Achievement Medals after the summer field exercises; they’ll also find that they need to send the kids who, in his office time, wears a MAGA hat at the bowling alley, to a leadership school because, well, who else will lead?

The ambitious signatories will probably try to make it in combat arms because it’s hard to make it all the way to the top without being an infantry officer, or armor officer, or artillery officer or some sort of officer who does kinetic stuff. After the new physical fitness requirements are introduced, this will be easier for the three male signatories than the females. Some of the females will probably try their hand at it, but it will be harder for them and most of them will probably finish their careers as captains or battalion commanders in less ambitious branches (transportation or medical supply, anyone?)

However, some of them will try to stay on in combat arms and, to their surprise, they will find that the vast majority of their soldiers are (the horror, the absolute horror) WHITE DUDES who are into Crossfit, death metal, shitty American beer, six-month marriages to strippers with hazy allegations of domestic abuse and unsustainable indebtedness after spending another $1000 to add another skull to the arm-sleeve tattoo. When headed into an environment like that, these cadets are probably cruisin’ for a bruisin’.

The post Wokeness Comes To West Point appeared first on The American Conservative.

No Placating Student Radicals

From historian Richard Pipes’s account of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, a precursor to the 1917 Revolution that overthrew the Tsar and brought Communism to power:

 

Note well:

Academic work became impossible as institutions of higher learning turned into ‘political clubs’: non-conforming professors and students were subjected to intimidation and harassment. 

We have seen this before. We know how this story ends.

The post No Placating Student Radicals appeared first on The American Conservative.

Building An American Kolakovic Family

Here is the dedication page from my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies:

As regular readers know, Father Kolakovic was a heroic Croatian priest who escaped Zagreb in 1943, just ahead of the Gestapo, which was trying to arrest him for doing anti-Nazi resistance work there. He landed in Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak region of what was then Czechoslovakia. He ditched his Croatian last name (Poglajen) and lived undercover using his mother’s maiden name, Kolakovic.

Father Kolakovic had studied the Soviet Union in the Russicum, the Vatican college that trained priests in Russian and Soviet studies. He knew how the Soviets thought. When he arrived in Bratislava and took up a teaching position in a university there, the priest told his students that the Germans were going to lose the war, but when the war was over, the Soviets were going to impose communism on their nation. When that happened, he said, the communist state was going to attempt to crush the Church, most of all by going after the clergy. The best hope the Slovak Christians had to survive what was coming was to build a strong, well-formed lay resistance movement, one that was capable of acting in the face of the institutional Catholic Church’s coming captivity.

Father Kolakovic organized what he called “the Family” — a network of small groups of Catholic students, who would gather for Sunday mass, prayer, and discussion. Their discussions weren’t only spiritual. They talked about the political and social situation in their country, and what living as faithful Christians there required them to do.

The Family spread all over the Slovak region. The Catholic hierarchy was generally skeptical of it. They thought Father Kolakovic was being alarmist, and in their clericalism, tendered suspicion over how much he was focusing on empowering the laity. Father Kolakovic was no revolutionary within the Church’s ranks. It was only that he understood what the Slovak bishops were slow to grasp: that the communists in power were going to be ruthless with the clergy, and attempt to exterminate the faith of the Slovak people by clamping down on the bishops and priests.

Germany lost the war in 1945, of course. In 1946, Czechoslovak authorities expelled Father Kolakovic. In 1948, there was a communist putsch, and everything Father Kolakovic predicted came to pass. But the Family was ready. When the state promulgated a law forbidding priests from working, the lay members of the Family, and allied priests, began to build the structure of the underground church. Most of them were in prison by 1951, but they persisted, and when they were released in the 1960s, resumed their labors. Jan Chryzostom Korec had been secretly ordained as an underground bishop, and helped direct and support their labors.

From Live Not By Lies:

František Mikloško, now in his seventies, was a central leader of the second wave of the Slovak underground church. When we meet for lunch in a Bratislava restaurant, he is quick to offer advice to the current generation of Christians, who, in his view, are facing a very different kind of challenge than he did at their age.

“When I talk to young people today, I tell them that they have it harder than we did in one way: it is harder to tell who is the enemy. I tell them that what is crucial is to stay true to yourself, true to your conscience, and also to be in community with other like-minded people who share the faith. We were saved by small communities.”

Mikloško, in his youth a close aide to the underground Catholic bishop Ján Chryzostom Korec, credits the clandestine bishop—made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II after communism’s fall—with emphasizing the importance of small communities.

“He told us that they”—the communists—“could take everything from us. They could take samizdat from us. They can take our opportunity to speak out publicly from us. But we can’t let them take away our small communities.”

Mikloško started university in Bratislava in 1966, and met the recently released prisoners Krčméry and Jukl. He was in the first small community the two Kolaković disciples founded at the university.

Christians like Krčméry and Jukl brought not only their expertise in Christian resistance to a new generation but also the testimony of their character. They were like electromagnets with a powerful draw to young idealists.

“It’s like in the Bible, the parable of ten righteous people,” says Mikloško. “True, in Slovakia, there were many more than ten righteous people. But ten would have been enough. You can build a whole country on ten righteous people who are like pillars, like monuments.”

These early converts spread the word about the community to other towns in Slovakia, just as the Kolaković generation had done. Soon there were hundreds of young believers, sustained by prayer meetings, samizdat, and one another’s fellowship.

“Finally, in 1988, the secret police called me in and said, ‘Mr. Mikloško, this is it. If you all don’t stop what you’re doing, you will force us to act,’” he says. “But by then, there were so many people, and the network was so large, that they couldn’t stop it.

That year, the underground church called the Candle Demonstration, the largest mass protest in Czechoslovakia since the 1968 Soviet invasion. It was a powerful precursor to 1989’s Velvet Revolution, which cast out communism.

Me with Jan Carnogursky (left) and Frantisek Miklosko (right), two heroes of Christian anticommunist resistance in Slovakia, in Bratislava 2019

Jan Simulcik, a contemporary Slovak historian, was a college student in the 1980s, and an activist in the underground church. He and his cell of fellow young Catholic men were part of the group that distributed Christian samizdat. They knew that if they were discovered, they would instantly go to prison. They acted as they did because they were men of faith, but also because they were inspired by the older men who led them in fact and by example:

“Most of us had fear, but there were people among us who really did act absolutely fearlessly. I’m thinking about Silvo Krčméry, Vlado Jukl, Bishop Korec, but there were hundreds, even thousands of others,” says historian Ján Šimulčik. “Young people like me saw their example and were able to grow in courage by their example. The lesson here is that when you see someone acting courageously, you will act courageously as well.”

What would the history of the church in Slovakia have been if not for Father Kolakovic, Father Jukl, Bishop Korec, Dr. Krcmery, and their disciples? It is impossible to say for sure, but know this: the Family was critically important to the church’s survival.

What about us? What will history say of us? What will our children and grandchildren judge? Look: it’s 1943 in America today. The main message of my book is that we faithful Christians have to prepare for a time of great trouble, even persecution. The book offers concrete suggestions from men and women who lived through the hard totalitarianism of the Soviet era. What I hope readers of Live Not By Lies will do is come together, wherever they are, to start small resistance cells modeled after Father Kolakovic’s family. He did it in a specifically Catholic context. Christians in America, in 2020, have to adapt the method to their own ecclesial context. I am putting together now a study guide and reading list to accompany Live Not By Lies, to help seed the creation of these cells nationwide. This will be made available for free when the book is published on September 29.

This morning I was in touch with the publisher, Sentinel, about this project. If you are a teacher or a religious leader who is drawn to the ideas in the book, and who thinks I might be on to something with the Kolakovic idea, then Sentinel is offering to send a digital advance reader copy of Live Not By Lies to you. I don’t know what limitations there might be on this offer, but if you would like to be considered, please e-mail me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, with LIVE NOT BY LIES in the subject line, in all caps, and I will forward your request to the folks in the New York office. Please identify the school in which you teach or the church group that you lead. This is only so we can keep up with the kind of people who are interested in the book.

To be clear, this is not a Catholic book, a Protestant book, or an Orthodox book. There are believers and confessors from all three Christian traditions interviewed in the book. Though it focuses on Christians, the strategies in this book will be applicable in most cases to believing Jews and Muslims too. We are all in this together. One thing I learned from reading the testimonies of survivors of the gulag was that religious differences melted away under persecution. Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, Jews — in communist prisons, and under torture, they were just brothers and sons of the living God.

One last passage, including a quote by the saintly Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand, tortured in Romanian prisons for his faith:

The faith that martyrs and confessors like the Christians cited here is a far cry from the therapeutic religion of the middle-class suburbs, the sermonizing of politicized congregations of the Left and the Right, and the health-and-wealth message of  “prosperity gospel” churches. These and other feeble forms of the faith will be quickly burned away in the face of the slightest persecution. Pastor Wurmbrand once wrote that there were two kinds of Christians: “those who sincerely believe in God and those who, just as sincerely, believe that they believe. You can tell them apart by their actions in decisive moments.”

The kind of Christians we will be in the time of testing depends on the kind of Christians we are today. And we cannot become the kind of Christians we need to be in preparation for persecution if we don’t know stories like this, and take them into our hearts.

The ultimate goal of Live Not By Lies is to prepare souls to act courageously and rightly in the decisive moments to come. If you think that your students, or your religious group (especially young people), need to hear this message and act on it, then e-mail me, and I’ll put you in touch with Sentinel. Again, you will be sent an unsharable digital copy of the book for preview. If you think its message is worthwhile, I would appreciate you telling others. The publication date is September 29 — in the Western church, the Feast of St. Michael The Archangel. Which was not planned, but is appropriate.

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