Rod Dreher's Blog, page 624

Benedict Option Omnibus

I find myself deeply annoyed by people who regard universities putting on things like Social Justice Retreats in which students and professors are indoctrinated with prejudice, racial and otherwise, as just one of those silly things that colleges do to pacify the Social Justice Warriors. Wake up, people. These policies are having, and are going to have, a major effect on the psychology of hiring, of admission to colleges, and all kinds of things. Future elites are being trained to look down on certain people only because of their race, gender, and other factors. Along those lines, a reader writes:

I sometimes think that both education and government employment (post office, etc.) are the areas where we’re going to see the biggest push for “diversity” which means that everybody gets hired before straight white heterosexual Christians. From there it will spread to private employers (and it already has, in many places). Yet people still act like there’s no reason for the Benedict Option: just keep living like we are! they say. Well, what happens when you pay $$$ for your kid to go to a small religious college (because the secular ones are more and more hostile) and then there’s no work afterward, and no hope of paying back those loans? I already hear stories from people in this sort of position, and it’s just going to get worse.

This is why the Benedict Option is at some point going to have to have an economic aspect. It is too much for me to cover in this first book, but if the book becomes a best-seller, that is a good sequel. Or maybe somebody else (Caleb Bernacchio?) can write it.

I remind you what “Prof. Kingsfield,” a professor at an elite law school who is closeted as a Christian, told me last year, after the Indiana RFRA debacle, about what’s to come:

Businesses, however, are going to have a very hard time resisting what’s coming. Not that they would try. “The big companies have already gone over,” said Kingsfield.

“Most anti-discrimination laws have a certain cut off – they don’t apply if you have 15 employees or less,” he said. “You could have an independent, loosely affiliated network of artisans, working together. If you can refer people to others within the network, that could work. You won’t be able to scale up, but that’s not such a bad thing.”

More:

“What happened to Brendan Eich” — the tech giant who was driven out of Mozilla for having made a small donation years earlier to the Prop 8 campaign — “is going to start happening to a lot of people, and Christians had better be ready for it. The question I keep thinking about is, why would we want to do that to people? But that’s where we are now.”

I pointed out that the mob hysteria that descended on Memories Pizza, the mom & pop pizza shop in small-town Indiana that had to close its doors (temporarily, one hopes) after its owners answered a reporter’s question truthfully, is highly instructive to the rest of us.

“You’re right,” he said. “Memories Pizza teaches us all a lesson. What is the line between prudently closing our mouths and closeting ourselves, and compromising our faith? Christians have to start thinking about that seriously.”

More:

“A lot of us will be able to ‘pass’ if we keep our mouths shut, but it’s going to be hard to tell who believes what,” Kingsfield said. “In [my area], there’s a kind of secret handshake that traditional Christians use to identify ourselves to each other when we meet. Forming those subterranean, catacomb church networks is not easy, but it’s terribly vital right now.”

“Your blog is important for us who feel alone where we are, because it let’s us know that there are others who feel this way,” Kingsfield said. “My wife says you should stop blogging and write your Benedict Option book right now. There is such a need for it. My hope for this book is that it will help Christians like us meet and build more of the networks that are going to carry us through.”

Kingsfield said he and his wife send their children to a classical Christian school in their area. “I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” he said. “Studying the past is so important. If you have an understanding of where we came from [as a culture], you can really see how insane we have gone.”

Through the classical Christian school community, he said, he and his wife have met believers from other traditions who are very sympathetic to the threat to all orthodox Christians, whether they are Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox.

“We have to get to know them better. We have to network with them. Our kids have to grow up with those kids, even if it means some driving, some traveling, arranging joint vacations,” Kingsfield said.

We will have to help each other get jobs. More:

It’s hard to say what kind of landscape Christians will be looking at twenty, thirty years from now. Kingsfield says he has gay colleagues in the university, people who are in their sixties and seventies now, who came of age in a time where a strong sense of individual liberty protected them. They still retain a devotion to liberty, seeing how much it matters to despised minorities.

“That generation is superseded by Social Justice Warriors in their thirties who don’t believe that they should respect anybody who doesn’t respect them,” Kingsfield said. “Those people are going to be in power before long, and we may not be protected.”

Bottom line: the Benedict Option is our the only path forward for us. Indiana shows that.

Read the whole thing. If you don’t understand what’s coming, you will not be ready for it when it does. They are going to tell you over and over that you’re paranoid, until it happens, in which case they will tell you that you deserve it. The SJW seminars are all about preparing the displaced people for accepting that they deserve it.

 

Moving on to more mundane Ben Op stuff (more mundane, but more useful), Dean Abbott ponders what we can do right now in the lives of our families. This is very good. Excerpt:

There is, however, a more reasonable approach. It begins by asking, “How Much Benedict Option is Enough Benedict Option?” Getting the major benefits of a Benedict Option lifestyle doesn’t require hauling your family off to the woods. In fact, just a few changes result in big Benedict Option results.

The 80/20 Rule

Let’s apply the Pareto principle. The Pareto principle states that in most situations, 80 percent of the effects are due to 20 percent of the causes. The economist who developed this idea was fond of pointing out that 20 percent of the pea plants in his garden contained 80 percent of the peas. If you run a business, you can expect 80 percent of your profits to come from 20 percent of your customers.

Obviously, attempts to escape a deteriorating culture are more difficult to quantify than the number of peas in one’s garden. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that the bulk of the goods one accrues from withdrawing from the surrounding culture will stem from only a few choices.

That has certainly been true for us.

Our family is already pretty opted out.  Just a few choices on my wife’s and my part have had a major impact on how much access the organs of the culture have to our daughters. I am pleased with how they are developing, especially when I consider the behavior and attitudes of their more culturally conformed peers.

I’m not going to tell you the four lifestyle choices that the Abbott family has made that have made a big difference in their lives, because I want you to read the whole thing.  I am going to tell you that our family made the same choices, and it has made an enormously positive difference, in the Benedict Option sense. There is more to be done, but these four things are a terrific start. As Dean Abbott writes:

Yet, it must be said, that the biggest upside to making these choices isn’t so much that they keep the culture outside the home at bay, but that they make space for the culture inside it to flourish. [Emphasis mine — RD] When the influence of the surrounding culture is minimized, the family itself becomes a healthier culture to rear children in, a more vital “little platoon” as Burke might say.

Achieving this is easier than it might seem. It’s tempting to fall into Benedict Option fantasies of moving to the backwoods to live off the land. It’s better to start small, with things that are actually feasible. Focus on those few choices that bring the bulk of the benefit. Do this, and see if what it produces isn’t exactly enough.

Enough, I would say, as a start. But what a great start! Read his post. 

Moving on again, I’ve been meaning to respond for a while to the Methodist writer Mark Tooley’s post suggesting the “Wesleyan Option” over the “Benedict Option.” He writes, in part:

The Benedict Option despairs of redeeming postmodern Western Civilization and counsels a Christian retreat into separatist communities to rebuild Christian culture through faithful discipleship. The model obviously is St. Benedict, who founded a vibrant monastic movement in the ashes of the imploding Roman Empire.

No doubt the Body of Christ and wider culture would benefit greatly if more Christians were to pursue some form of the Benedict Option, creating centers of self-denying devotion, prayer, learning and charity, even celibacy. May this movement, to the extent it fosters Christian growth and witness, grow and prosper!

But just as in Benedict’s day, roughly 99 percent plus of Christians will decline to actively pursue this option. Maybe some don’t have the spiritual insight and discipline. But many more likely don’t have the calling. Throughout the church’s history most believers have had a vocation to live and work within the world, with all of its temptations and snares.

Because I really like and respect Mark’s work, and think he’s made an honest mistake here, I’m going to break my rule of ceasing to engage with people who insist that the Benedict Option is only about running off to the hills in separatist communities. As I say in the Benedict Option FAQ:

Do you really think you can just run away from the world and live off in a compound somewhere? Get real!

No, I don’t think that at all. While I wouldn’t necessarily fault people who sought geographical isolation, that will be neither possible nor desirable for most of us. The early Church lived in cities, and formed its distinct life there. Most of the Ben Op communities that come to mind today are not radically isolated, in geography or otherwise, from the broader community. It’s simply nonsense to say that Ben Oppers want to hide from the world and live in some sort of fundamentalist enclave. Some do, and it’s not hard to find examples of how this sort of thing has gone bad. But that is not what we should aim for. In fact, I think it’s all too easy for people to paint the Benedict Option as utopian escapism so they can safely wall it off and not have to think about it.

Isn’t this a violation of the Great Commission? How can we preach the Gospel to the nations when we’re living in these neo-monastic communities?

Well, what is evangelizing? Is it merely dispersing information? Or is there something more to it. The Benedict Option is about discipleship, which is itself an indirect form of evangelism. Pagans converted to the early Church not simply because of the words the first Christians spoke, but because of the witness of the kinds of lives they lived. It has to be that way with us too.

Pope Benedict XVI said something important in this respect. He said that the best apologetic arguments for the truth of the Christian faith are the art that the Church has produced as a form of witness, and the lives of its saints:

Yet, the beauty of Christian life is even more effective than art and imagery in the communication of the Gospel message. In the end, love alone is worthy of faith, and proves credible. The lives of the saints and martyrs demonstrate a singular beauty which fascinates and attracts, because a Christian life lived in fullness speaks without words. We need men and women whose lives are eloquent, and who know how to proclaim the Gospel with clarity and courage, with transparency of action, and with the joyful passion of charity.

The Benedict Option is about forming communities that teach us and help us to live in such a way that our entire lives are witnesses to the transforming power of the Gospel.

Yes, I know, this is what the church is supposed to be for. If the churches were doing what they (we) are supposed to be doing, we might not need to talk about Benedict Options. But they aren’t, so we must.

Anyway, back to Mark Tooley’s post, which, I’m afraid, turns the Ben Op into a straw man here:

Supposedly, even amid our unprecedented wealth, comfort and numbers, we live in very bleak times. Widespread Christian engagement didn’t create Zion in America, therefore it was all for naught. The earlier generation of Christian culture warriors are now supposed to have been an embarrassment for which the church should now atone. But no amount of apology will forestall the imminent apocalypse, which mostly includes critical internet commentary about Christianity and the occasional same sex rite at the local court house or empty Unitarian church. Woe is us as we drive our SUVs into the parking lots of megachurches in prosperous suburbs. Scary times indeed!

Of course, the secular culture does and has always posed serious threats to faithful Christian living. This spiritual warfare is permanent until the parousia. But all in all, Christians in 2015 America, even as the Devil still roams about like a roaring lion, have it better than any previous generation. Who among us would really prefer to live in 1950, 1850, or 1750, when America and Western Civilization were supposedly more Christian, never mind slavery, segregation and a thousand other social wickednesses countenanced by society and church?

Again, because I believe that Mark (whom I don’t know personally) writes out of good faith, I’ll point again to the Benedict Option FAQ as a way of saying that I do not imagine a Golden Age of Faith. The world has always been going to hell, so to speak. The sum total of sin in the world has no doubt been constant throughout the ages. We make progress against one sin, and two others worsen. It will be that way until the end of time. This “because we didn’t create Zion it was all for naught” business is a straw man the size of Sasquatch.

What makes this time different from the past is that we are now living in a post-Christian culture, one that has ceased to assume the fundamental truths of Christianity (or, if you prefer, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles) as normative. This is not about the church losing political power; this is about the Christian story having become not only unbelievable to many, but, increasingly, a menace to what a growing number of people believe to be the Good. And it is about the churches losing their own stories, and with them, their own people. It is about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism embraced as an ersatz substitute for Christianity — MTD being exactly the kind of pseudo-faith that late modernity, or post-modernity, requires as psychological support for its vanities and indulgences. The Benedict Option, among other things, is about fighting the cultural amnesia that has overtaken the churches in the West.

I suppose it’s unfair to blame people who don’t read this blog regularly for badly misinterpreting the Benedict Option. I will be glad when I have this book finished, and can say, “Here is the detailed vision I have, in one place.”

So, on to the meat of Tooley’s post, which is very good. He says we should look to John Wesley, not St. Benedict, for a more realistic and effective example:

Benedictine Option enthusiasts should like the Wesleyan example because it was built around small, intensely committed prayer and accountability groups with rigorous discipline who created distinct communities within a pervasively corrupt society and spiritually lax institutional church. Evangelism, discipleship, self-denial, service to others, and Christian joy were central emphases.

Wesleyans weren’t just focused on the spiritual charisms of their own movement. They self-consciously envisioned their vocation for spiritually renewing society and temporal polities. Wesley himself kept his movement out of direct political engagement. But he knew that as Methodism preached personal and social holiness throughout Britain and America there would be societal and political fruits. Wesley saw his times and culture as part of Christendom but also deeply in rebellion against God. He used the available foundations of a “Christian” nation, which included a relative legal religious liberty, despite howling hostile mobs, to proclaim the Gospel.

Early Methodism in America seized much of the frontier, where religion, formal or otherwise, was often absent. Methodist populism and revivalism, with its concern for social redemption, helped create America’s self-understanding of its democracy. It also contributed spiritual tools within civil religion for perennial social and political reform movements that continue to this day.

To varying degrees Methodism has repeated much of this process of personal and social renewal in once non-Christian cultures in Asia and Africa.

Methodism saw its surrounding culture as often wicked and hostile to the Gospel, which is perennially true, even in ostensibly Christian societies. Yet this challenge did not inspire cultural withdrawal but challenged Methodists to aggressively confront and work to change the cultures it spiritually invaded.

Read the whole thing.  It’s good, but I would ask Mark this: Where did the spiritual and communal resources to fuel this aggressive Methodist confrontation come from? I can’t think of anyone in America who has done a better job than Mark Tooley of detailing the decline of Methodism in particular and the Protestant Mainline in general into an effete chaplaincy to secular liberalism. (Here is his latest on that front.) How did this happen? How can it be resisted, even reversed, within Methodism?

The way I’m approaching the Benedict Option is as a varied renewal movement within small-o orthodox Christianity. If I’m successful in thinking through and articulating my vision, Mark and other orthodox Wesleyans like him will be able to draw from it inspiration and methods (heh) to revitalize their own tradition. Some Christian traditions will have it easier than others, because of their theology and ecclesiology, but all the orthodox should be able to benefit at some level. That is my hope.

 

Germany & Refugee Kitsch

A German reader writes, on the “Merkelized Germany” thread:

I remember that after 9/11 I followed US politicians and media with amazement as they marched towards war with Iraq. To me as an outsider it was incomprehensible how an entire country (or at least its political class and its media) could be so uncritical, so misguided, so stupid, so deluded in a manner that was so completely obvious.

Now, for about the last year and a half, I have had to witness the same thing in my own country in the “refugee” crisis. Different issue, different motives, but the same incomprehensible degree of obvious delusion and stupidity. The result will be equally disastrous, only that the US will one day overcome and forget the consequences of the Iraq war and Germany will have to live with this idiocy for generations.

As someone who was caught up in the pro-war frenzy, this gives me an interesting insight into what Germany is going through. In the march-up to the Iraq War, it was, for many of us (mea maxima culpa) inconceivable that there could be any morally valid or even logical objection to the Iraq War. You remember the infamous National Review cover denouncing the founders of The American Conservative and conservatives who were against the coming war as “unpatriotic”? That’s what it was like. I had just left NR when that cover came out, and though I winced at it, I can’t say that I was outraged. That’s what it felt like to be inside the pro-war bubble back then.

Speaking for myself, I thought back in 2002 and early 2003 that the only reasons one could be against the war was that one was a naive fool, or a moral coward. I am not proud of that today; I only bring it up to point out how difficult it was to conceive of an honorable, or even sensible, opposition to the war. Here’s the important point: it was so very, very important to be morally right, marching through history on the side of the righteous.

I am reminded of Milan Kundera’s concept of the “Grand March of History” in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being — an idea captured in these lines:

“The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies.  The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.”

More Kundera:

What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

Mind you, Kundera was writing as an exile from Communism, but it doesn’t take much imagination to alter his quote like this, in light of the pro-war madness of 2002-03:

What makes an American an American is not geography but his ability to integrate any war into the kitsch called the Grand March.

… that is, the Grand March to liberal democracy. Because I well remember how right it felt to be waging that war. The naïfs and the cowards and Old Europe would not prevail. We who had the vision and the courage to stand against terrorism, show our great and terrible face to the enemy, and impose liberal democracy on the Middle East would be vindicated. Again, Kundera had my number:

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. … Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

There were lots of second tears in America in 2002-03, with regard to the war and Grand March of History, led by George W. Bush. I was guilty too.

Sounds like there are lots of second tears in Germany 2015-16, with regard to the refugee situation and the Grand March of History, led by Angela Merkel.

This is not to say that it’s always wrong to accept refugees, or that it’s always wrong to go to war. I’m making a point about the role sentimentality and conformity unconsciously play in our decision-making. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. Precisely. It is so difficult to think clearly and without sentimentality when you are in situations like this because asking questions strikes one as indecent. Everyone is vulnerable to this weakness. Every single person. Thinking that it could not possibly happen to you is to make it more likely.

St. Benedict and the Prophet Stanley

Jake Meador continues to be a terrific Evangelical critic and supporter of the Benedict Option. From his latest, which concerns Stanley Hauerwas and the Benedict Option:

If the BenOp is about a corrective to some specific problems that have arisen in the North American church since the post-war years, then that is all to the good. It is not hard to argue that the second half of the 20th century was a uniquely poor time in the history of the western church and a move that would take us away from that by making some very specific course corrections to deal with significant problems is all to the good.

If the BenOp simply means that we need to revisit the question of Christian education for our children and begin thinking more seriously about what practical steps can be taken to create thicker bonds of friendship within our churches in order to produce more mature, stout-hearted believers then it’s hard to see how anyone could object to it. Indeed, that simply sounds like basic Christian wisdom to me.

But if the BenOp means that we ought to expect the Christian church to always live on the margins of society and that we must create more set-apart social bodies to serve as colonies existing in perpetual opposition to a hostile world, then we are dealing with something quite different.

One final note—I would hate for anyone to think that the chief question here is simply one about societal withdrawal. That is the issue everyone wants to discuss with the BenOp, but it’s actually not a very interesting question. Christians are called to be in the world, not of it. So we will always be in the world. And Rod has been very clear on this point, even though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise based on the lazy accusations of some of his critics. The concern is what the shape of our being in the world will be. Are we people living counter-culturally who, nonetheless, see that there really is a great harvest out there and who are hopeful about our prospects and have a plan for what happens when the harvest comes? Or are we more like Jonah, willing to preach repentance but in the back of our minds convinced that the king will never hear us? If you think it’s the former, then your take on the BenOp is likely to look quite different than it would if you believe the latter.

Read the whole thing. It’s really good, and important.

The next six months of researching and writing the Benedict Option book is going to press me hard on this question, for which I have no definitive answer now. Personally, I situate myself somewhere between the two alternatives Jake proposes, though leaning to the less Hauerwasian side of things. Here’s what I mean.

I believe that the Ben Op is a corrective to orthodoxy and orthopraxy. I believe it is also about more effective education for our young, and about thickening the bonds of faith and friendship among orthodox believers. This is, as Jake says, “basic Christian wisdom.”

Which raises the question: “If the Benedict Option is only about getting the Church to do what the Church ought to have been doing all along, why do you have to give it a name? Isn’t this just about branding?”

The answer shows why the Hauerwasian approach has appeal, though a limited one.

We can start by asking a point by a Protestant reader who sent me Jake’s link. He’s referring to the Meador paragraph saying that the Ben Op, so defined, is “basic Christian wisdom”:

That’s all true, but if Evangelicals want to make the case that they are already doing this, they need to be called out on that.

That excellent point is also true of all Christians living in the West, not just Evangelicals. One big reason we Christians have not been doing this is because we have wrongly assumed that the “civil religion” of the general culture supports us, or at least does not oppose us. Relatedly, we have radically underestimated the nature of the threat to small-o orthodox Christianity by the very structures of modernity that form us. (If you are a subscriber to the Mars Hill Audio Journal, you know all this; if you are not a subscriber, you are missing out on vitally important information). A response to the crisis that is merely about doing what we’ve always done, only more of it, is bound to be inadequate.

I call for a rediscovery of the ways of the early Benedictines for several basic reasons:

1. They were formed in the age of what the Reformed theologian Hans Boersma calls “the Great Tradition” of Christianity — meaning, in his usage, the first thousand years of Christianity, when the “Platonic-Christian” synthesis of the Church Fathers laid the groundwork for a “sacramental ontology” (to oversimplify, that means seeing God truly present in all things, not separate from His creation). Recovery of a sacramental worldview is foundational to the project of recovering from modernity’s distortions.

2. The Benedictines order their lives by regular prayer and communal ritual that form their understanding of who they are and how they relate to God and to each other.

3. The Benedictines understand themselves to be both in the world but not of it. That is, their sense of hospitality opens them to the world, but they also understand that to remain faithful to their Christian calling, they must also draw lines between themselves and the broader world. It is fine to be open to the world, but not when it compromises one’s fidelity to the community’s Rule.

4. The first Benedictines came together for something: to worship God in community amid particular circumstances. But we must remember too that the chaos and degeneration of Late Antique Rome was the impetus for St. Benedict to withdraw to the desert (so to speak) to pray, and ultimately to form a new kind of community. Over the centuries, the Benedictine monasteries became spiritual and communal centers for laymen as well.

5. Basic Benedictine practices leading to a more ordered and resilient Christian existence, grounded in prayer, Scripture, and common life, can be adapted to lay Christian life in a variety of traditions (Evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox) and locations (city, suburb, country), and serve as a symbollein — a drawing together — of what the forces of modernity are tearing apart (diabollein) and scattering.

The working title of my forthcoming book is The Benedict Option: Resistance, Resilience, and Resurrection in a Post-Christian Age. The “Resurrection” part speaks to the un-Hauerwasian part of my sensibility. I don’t believe that the Church must always be a loser, and must always oppose whatever the world and its government says and does. The early Benedictines didn’t come together with the goal in mind of saving Western civilization by preserving within their communities knowledge, both in tradition and written, of the faith, and of the past. They just wanted to pray and to live faithful to God, and to what they had been given. The secondary effect they had, though, was to seed Western Europe with the Gospel. As Prof. Russell Hittinger told me, the Benedictine vow of stability had a huge effect on this process, because it meant that the monks who established a particular monastery weren’t going to go away, no matter what. If barbarians sacked the monastery and killed the monks, the mother house would just send more. Thus, resilience.

I am Hauerwasian in the sense that I expect the “long defeat” (Tolkien’s phrase), and I think it is important for Christians to understand that merely tweaking what we have been doing is not remotely sufficient to counter the threat (and believe me, the threat is far, far more of a Huxleyan kind than Orwellian). But I am not Hauerwasian in this sense: unlike the Prophet Stanley, I hope for the eventual restoration of a more Christian society, in time, and don’t feel obliged to spite the government at every turn. To use a phrase of Peter Leithart’s quoted in Jake Meador’s piece, I believe the Benedict Option must not “refuse to succeed.” Defeatism is not next to godliness! Yet we contemporary Christians have a distorted idea of what constitutes victory, and that’s something I want to challenge. Restoring the 1950s must not be the goal of the Benedict Option, or it will fail. It is helpful for us Christians to be thinking more in Hauerwasian terms, for the sake of shaking us out of our complacency about where we stand in relation to post-Christian American culture.

All this is still fairly sketchy for me, and I will be putting lots of meat on the bones in the coming months (which means I will be blogging far less about it here; I don’t want to write the whole book in public). I continue to learn from you all, especially from engaged critics like Jake Meador.

 

Merkelized Germany

A reader sends this AP story in about a rash of New Year’s Eve assaults in Cologne:

Police say dozens of women reported being sexually assaulted and robbed around Cologne’s main train station, next to the city’s famous cathedral, during the night from Thursday to Friday. At least 90 criminal complaints have been filed, including one allegation of rape.

“The actions of the perpetrators were completely intolerable, and so we expect them to be prosecuted in the toughest possible way,” Reker said.

According to police, witnesses described the assaults as being committed by men of “Arab or North African origin” who had gathered in large numbers near the train station.

Separately, police in the northern city of Hamburg appealed for witnesses who observed similar sexual assaults and thefts in the St. Pauli district on New Year’s night.

The BBC reports:

The scale of the attacks on women at the city’s central railway station has shocked Germany. About 1,000 drunk and aggressive young men were involved.

City police chief Wolfgang Albers called it “a completely new dimension of crime”. The men were of Arab or North African appearance, he said.

…

What is particularly disturbing is that the attacks appear to have been organised. Around 1,000 young men arrived in large groups, seemingly with the specific intention of carrying out attacks on women.

Police in Hamburg are now reporting similar incidents on New Year’s Eve in the party area of St Pauli. One politician says this is just the tip of the iceberg.

But of course:

The justice minister warned against linking the crimes to the issue of migrants and refugees.

From The Guardian:

One investigator told the Kölner Express: “The female victims were so badly pushed about, they had heavy bruises on their breasts and behinds.”

Critics of Angela Merkel’s open-door policy on refugees were quick to blame it for the attacks, despite the police’s insistence that the alleged perpetrators were not new arrivals.

One tweet attributed to a follower of Pegida, the anti-Islam, anti-immigrant protest group , stated: “Merkel … you’re an accessory to the abuse at Cologne.”

On Pegida’s Facebook page, a woman identifying herself as Angelina Southern got more than 500 likes for her comment: “I could puke when I read this, and there are still so many deluded idiots who say ‘Welcome refugees’ … Close the borders now. For God’s sake, Merkel belongs on the scaffold.”

The attacks have been the main talking point on Twitter in Germany, with some people accusing the media of a cover-up and others expressing their concern that the incident would be seized on by anti-refugee groups.

Why shouldn’t it be? Why shouldn’t Germans, especially German women, worry about a massive influx of young men from cultures that regards Western women as whores?

UPDATE: A reader in the UK sends these two links. In the first, one Natalie Naugahyde Nougarèyde writes in The Guardian (where else?) about how We Need To Dialogue. Excerpt:

If a promising dynamic can be created, it must come from civil society – and serious media organisations have a role to play. Now is the time to launch a pan-European citizens’ debate on diversity. This would help to prepare for a future where our democracies can resist populist pressures or social disintegration. Saying that migrants, whatever their cultural background, must abide by laws as much as be protected by them, may be stating the obvious but it also raises sensitivities and should therefore be part of that debate. Using online platforms and the linking of communities beyond borders, to share experiences, life stories, to map out problems areas and the ways people can work to overcome them could be a good option.

The cluelessness as to what’s actually happening staggers.

The reader’s second story is a November 2014 one from a local Cambridge (UK) newspaper:

A Libyan soldier has hit out at the armed forces claiming they did not tell them the “difference between right and wrong” in the UK.

Omar Al-Mukhtar, not one of the accused, said that his colleagues thought the five men alleged to have committed sex offences in Cambridge were badly treated.

He said the Libyan cadets were allowed out for only three hours a week and were always accompanied by British soldiers when they left the barracks.

The Libyan cadets, who were in the UK for training, allegedly committed a variety of sex assaults, including in one case the rape of a man. How were they to know that rape was against the law in Britain? How, indeed.

UPDATE.2: James C. adds:

No longer allegedly, I’m afraid. All of the accused were convicted. The male rapists got sentenced to 12 years—though they most certainly won’t serve that many.

The three Libyans convicted of sexually assaulting the teenage women in Cambridge are already out of prison and–get this–are claiming asylum in the UK:http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Libyan-soldiers-convicted-sexual-assault/story-27895222-detail/story.html

They certainly seem to have a good grasp of ‘human rights’ law when it is convenient for them. Perhaps they can move in next door to the radical Islamic preachers and their broods who already live shamelessly off the British taxpayer and who are also experts on exploiting ‘human rights’ law.

Hurting Ordinary Iranians, Hurting America Too

Further correspondence with reader Mohammad, in Iran:

Fifteen years ago, there was much more goodwill towards the Americans in Iran’s general public, despite the enmity between the governments and the sanctions. Notwithstanding the rhetoric coming from the government, most people thought that the friendship with the USA was what was needed. Iranians were, and still are, very suspicious of the British, and the conspiracy theories in Iran often includes the British as the ever present conspirators. However, the general attitude of public towards the USA was quite positive, despite the revolutionary zeal of the first years of a revolution which was every bit inspired by the leftist ideologies. there were even quite a few Iranians who, in the first days after Iraq invasion, thought that an invasion of Iran would be a marvelous idea and would rid them of Mullahs, the same way the Iraq invasion rid Iraqis of Saddam. Foolish are some people, for sure!

That good will slowly and gradually evaporated. First, the Iraq adventure went so badly that the people realized the folly of American adventurism and democracy-building. Furthermore, what happened in Syria baffled many as why the Americans are doing all this. At the beginning of the Syrian uprising, many Iranian secular or liberal intellectuals thought of it as a good thing, especially because they thought of Assad as an ally of the Iranian regime. I remember the hot discussions I had with these people, as I was  very skeptical, indeed cynically so, of ANY revolution (be it French, Russian, Iranian, Arab…). However, as the rebels proved themselves to be some religious fanatics, the opinion of these intellectuals started to sour on them. What they did not understand was the adamant refusal of the American political class to understand that, in this Assad is more preferable, indeed very much so, to ANY realistic alternative.

The other day I was with some older university professors, all of whom were very much liberal in their outlook. They usually have a disdain for the Iranian regime. However, they were saying that one thing that they think the Supreme Leader of Iran had understood much better than they was the fact that the Americans are totally unworthy of trust! The issue they were discussing was the recent legislation of the US Congress, which imposed sanctions on Europeans traveling to Iran. The legislation, which basically punishes everybody who travels to Iran, was a response to what happened in Paris and San Bernardino. This legislation does not penalize Europeans or anyone else who travels to Saudi Arabia (not that I regard this a good policy, but…). Consider the fact that just recently Iranians made a lot of concessions with regard to their nuclear program in exchange of the lifting of sanctions, the fact that the Iranians did not have anything whatsoever to do with those shootings, the fact that Saudi Arabia and Turkey got only a small nagging in all this, and you can figure out why the Iranians are so much pissed off by this.

All this might sound quite abstract to you, but consider this: my sister who has studied tourism and has not had a job for quite a while, was planning  for an opportunity that the influx of the European tourists was promising to bring. Now all that hope has been destroyed, all because of something which is neither Iranian people’s nor even the Iranian regime’s fault. Can my sister be blamed if she becomes completely suspicious of the Americans? In fact, throughout the last 10 years or so, the people most hurt by the sanctions were the middle class people in Iran, who are the friendliest towards the west in the whole region. I understand the political administration in the USA is traditionally fragmented, which causes that those with strong lobby impose their will on the whole system, but this fact is rather so abstract for an Iranian, or even for an ordinary American, to grasp.

We live in a crazy world!

All this I wrote in the hope that there could be more understanding between us: your people and mine. May God grant us peace.

Here is a NYT story on the recent Congressional action Mohammad’s talking about:

Tensions mounted between Iran and the United States on Wednesday over a new American law that limits visa-free travel, which the Iranians regard as a sanction and a violation of the recently completed nuclear accord.

The Iranian foreign minister and Republican critics of Iran traded warnings about the visa law, which is barely a week old.

The law applies to foreigners who would otherwise be eligible to travel to the United States without a visa. It denies that privilege to anyone who has visited Iran in the past five years or who holds Iranian citizenship. The same restriction applies to citizens of or visitors to Syria, Iraq or Sudan.

The law is part of an American antiterrorism response to the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., and is primarily directed at suspected members and supporters of the Islamic State, the extremist Sunni group that controls parts of Iraq and Syria. Sudan and Iran were included partly because they have been on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism for many years.

Iran, however, is a Shiite-majority country that opposes Sunni fundamentalist groups and is helping to fight them.

Iranian officials say that it is nonsensical to include Iran in the new visa law, and that the provision seems intended to sabotage the nuclear accord. The accord calls for Western nations to lift many economic sanctions against Iran and to not impose new ones, in exchange for verifiable guarantees that Iran’s nuclear work is peaceful.

Note well that this measure originated with Republican members of Congress, though Obama signed it. Why, exactly, are we punishing the Iranians (and Europeans who travel there) over something that Sunni terrorists did? Is it the same knee-jerk reflex that causes us to see Putin’s Russia as our enemy in the Middle East?

By the way, please read Daniel Larison’s latest asking why the US continues to indulge the Saudis. They started this whole round of new tensions by chopping the head off of an imprisoned Shiite religious leader.

Teaching Race Hate At Oregon State

Oregon State University is taking part in the Social Justice War, sponsoring “social justice retreats” to raise anti-white consciousness on campus, and increase racial discord. That’s not what they say, of course, but that’s what they’re doing. More:

Racial Aikido Retreat

Racial Aikido seeks to empower students of color at predominantly White insititutions (PWIs) using the principles of aikido to recognize, respond, and replenish. Originally created at the University of Vermont, Racial Aikido acknowledges that people of color may be ill prepared to deal with issues of race and racism as it affects them personally. Racial Aikido promotes tools for people of color to maintain a positive self-image and be able to respond to overt and covert racism.

By the conclusion of the retreat, you will have a better understanding of White privilege, in-group and internalized oppression, identity development models, and be more self-aware of your multiple identities. You’ll learn by active participation just how to recognize racism, respond to racism in a self-affirming and positive manner that is appropriate for the situation, and replenish by taking care of your needs in order to maintain a healthy physical, emotional, and spiritual self.

Here’s another retreat offered:

Examining White Identity in a Multicultural World Retreat

The Examining White Identity (EWI) retreat focuses on White identity development, White privilege, and oppression in both personal and institutional contexts, while introducing strategies to dismantle oppressive systems. We will look at ways that understanding these issues will help us address White privilege and oppression in ourselves and with other White people and become better allies for social justice.

And a third:

Examining White Identity for Faculty and Staff

Faculty facilitators of the EWI in a Multicultural World retreat are hosting a pilot experience for faculty and staff. This one-and-a-half day, experiential, on-campus retreat will focus on: white identity, socialization, institutional racism and dominance. 

We will work to build our capacity to dismantle oppressive systems, and we will build a network for continued dialogue and learning. So join us on Friday-Saturday, January 8-9, 2016. To register, please visit: http://tinyurl.com/ewi-facstaff

All white (self-identified) faculty and staff are invited to sign up. Capacity is limited. However, we will continue to accept registrations after all spaces have been filled, and you will have the option to indicate your interest in future opportunities as they become available.

So, what does this tell us? That it is the official policy of Oregon State University to train minority students to be especially conscious of their minority status vis-a-vis white people, and to be paranoid against perceived slights. According to the Daily Caller, a promotional video on the retreat site quotes a student saying “that the retreat provides students of color with “a set of tools to deal with overt or subtle microaggressions that you experience as a marginalized student.”

It is also the official policy to train willing white students to hate themselves and their culture, and white faculty to facilitate this self-loathing, under the rubric of “dismantling oppressive systems.”

What are the white Oregon taxpayers (outside of The People’s Republic of Portlandia) expected to think about the fact that a state university is engaged in promoting hostility, even hatred, towards whites as a group? Recall what Jonathan Haidt said about the 2015 social science finding that in contemporary America, people hate those who disagree with them more than any other group:

This is extremely bad news for science and universities because universities are usually associated with the left. In the United States, universities have moved rapidly left since 1990, when the left-right ratio of professors across all departments was less than two to one. By 2004, the left-right ratio was roughly five to one, and it is still climbing. In the social sciences and humanities it is far higher. Because this political purification is happening at a time of rising cross-partisan hostility, we can expect increasing hostility from Republican legislators toward universities and the things they desire, including research funding and freedom from federal and state control.

Tribal conflicts and tribal politics took center stage in 2015. Iyengar and Westwood help us understand that tribal conflicts are no longer just about race, religion, and nationality. Cross-partisan prejudice should become a focus of concern and research. In the United States, it may even be a more urgent problem than cross-racial prejudice.

What happens when the white taxpayers of Oregon realize that one of their state universities is openly indoctrinating their children in self-hatred, and, through politically correct sophistry, calling it “social justice”? How can they expect that their children will get a fair shake in classrooms led by professors who believe that their kids come into the classroom with an unfair advantage simply because of the color of their skin?

Progressives, especially in academia, are sowing seeds of destruction, and not just of the academy. They are promoting tribalism and tribal politics. They assume that making white people think of themselves as a separate, undifferentiated tribe,  is the first step in making them despise themselves as a people, and therefore be willing to surrender to other tribes. They are wrong. These blind progressives are calling up the demon of white nationalism and accelerating the Balkanization of America. This is not going to end well.

I teach my children that it is evil to judge others on the basis of their skin color or ethnicity, that people must be judged as individuals, by the content of their character. I expect them to think and act according to those standards. But I also expect them not to stand for it when someone openly discriminates against them, treating them as morally suspect or damaged simply because of the color of their skin. Like Oregon State University does, poisoning the minds of students of all races who participate in these “social justice retreats.”

UPDATE: Kenan Malik’s 2015 Foreign Affairs article on the failure of European multiculturalism is relevant here. Excerpt:

[E]verywhere, the overarching consequences have been the same: fragmented societies, alienated minorities, and resentful citizenries.

As a political tool, multiculturalism has functioned as not merely a response to diversity but also a means of constraining it. And that insight reveals a paradox. Multicultural policies accept as a given that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. They seek to institutionalize diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes—into a singular, homogeneous Muslim community, for example—and defining their needs and rights accordingly. Such policies, in other words, have helped create the very divisions they were meant to manage.

Excerpts:

Cathy Cuthbertson once worked at what might be thought of as a command post of political correctness — the campus of a prestigious liberal arts college in Ohio.

“You know, I couldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And when we wrote things, we couldn’t even say ‘he’ or ‘she,’ because we had transgender. People of color. I mean, we had to watch every word that came out of our mouth, because we were afraid of offending someone, but nobody’s afraid of offending me,” the former administrator said.

All of which helps explain why the 63-year-old grandmother showed up at a recent Donald Trump rally in Hilton Head Island, S.C., where she moved when she retired a year ago.

The Republican front-runner is “saying what a lot of Americans are thinking but are afraid to say because they don’t think that it’s politically correct,” she said. “But we’re tired of just standing back and letting everyone else dictate what we’re supposed to think and do.”

More:

One thing is clear: Trump is channeling a very mainstream frustration.

In an October poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University, 68 percent agreed with the proposition that “a big problem this country has is being politically correct.”

It was a sentiment felt strongly across the political spectrum, by 62 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 81 percent of Republicans. Among whites, 72 percent said they felt that way, but so did 61 percent of nonwhites.

“People feel tremendous cultural condescension directed at them,” and that their values are being “smirked at, laughed at” by the political and media elite, said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt.

Because it is, and they are. “A sentiment felt strongly across the political spectrum.” As the SJWs and their campus administrative abettors would see if they would pull their heads out of their progressive rear ends.

Benedict Option for Progressives

A number of you have forwarded to me today this post from Richard Beck, the first of six he promises to do about how the Benedict Option can be embraced by progressive Christians. Excerpts:

Rod is Eastern Orthodox and is a conservative Christian. Consequently, most of the discussion about the Ben Op has been among conservative Christians, from Catholic to Orthodox to evangelical.

But if you look at Rod’s description–the Ben Op as

Richard Beck, from Experimental Theology

resistance to Empire–there’s a lot in his description that resonates with progressive Christians. For many, resistance to Empire is at the heart of the progressive Christian vision. In fact, progressive Christians would argue that this is exactly the reason that evangelical Christians, in particular, are very poor candidates for the Ben Op.

The reason for this should be obvious. Conservative evangelicals have been some of the biggest religious champions of American Empire. There are no greater advocates of global American military supremacy and free-market capitalism than evangelicals.

Let’s make America great again, amiright?

In short, given their boosterism for American supremacy and exceptionalism it seems that conservative evangelicals are awkward candidates when it comes to creating Ben Op communities, communities that are, in Rod’s definition, “keen to construct local forms of community as loci of Christian resistance against what the [American] empire represents.”

Ah, but this does not hold if by “Empire” we mean the cultural imperialism of America’s individualism, consumerism, anti-familism, and sexual libertinism. Empire is not only a matter of politics, military, and economics. I would contend that progressive Christianity embraces what I consider to be a form of cultural imperialism, and calls it liberation.

More Richard Beck:

And yet, progressive Christians have their own struggles with the corrosive effects of modernity, capitalism and liberalism. For now, let me mention a few particular struggles.

First, there is often little that is distinctive about progressive Christians when compared to secular, liberal humanists. Let me be clear, as a progressive Christian I think this is a feature rather than a bug. I tend to think that liberal humanism owes its moral vision to Western Christianity. For arguments making that case see, well, see Alasdair MacIntyre’sAfter Virtue. Or Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. So I tend to see liberal humanists as cousins of Christianity rather than as opponents. There’s a family relationship.

And yet, progressive Christians are increasingly vulnerable to the cultural amnesia symptomatic of modernity. Because of this progressive Christians are increasingly embarrassed or defensive about their faith. That, or increasingly filled with doubt about their beliefs. The ranks of progressive Christians are filled with agnostics and atheists.

All that to say, progressive Christians need a Ben Op to recover confidence in the distinctive particularities of the Christian faith. Progressive Christians need the Ben Op to affirm what is unique and distinctive about being a Christian. Morally, spiritually, culturally, politically, socially, and religiously.

There’s more — read the whole thing.  I appreciate Richard Beck’s generous attention to the Ben Op idea, and look forward to his forthcoming posts. About the last passage I quoted, this is why I can’t see the Ben Op ever taking off among progressive Christians, aside from small groups like the New Monastics. That’s because, as Beck says, there is very little difference between secular liberals and religious liberals. The “cultural amnesia” Beck laments is not a bug of progressive Christianity, but a feature, in that progressive Christians do not feel bound by the past, by tradition, or by the exercise of doctrinal authority. How on earth can you have a Benedict Option when the very definition of modernity (of which progressive Christianity is the fullest Christian expression) is the denial that the past has any hold on us?

A few months back, I wrote about Paul Connerton’s book How Societies Remember, and the Benedict Option. Excerpt:

Connerton says that modernity is a condition of deliberate forgetting, of choosing to deny the power of the past to affect our actions in the present, so as to create a new condition of existence marked by the individual’s freedom of choice. Capitalism requires this deliberate forgetting, and facilitates it, and rites we invent in modern times “are palliative measures, façades erected to screen off the full implications of this vast worldwide clearing operation.” Here is the core:

Under the conditions of modernity the celebration of recurrence can never be anything more than a compensatory strategy, because the principle of modernity itself denies the idea of life as a structure of celebrated recurrence. It denies credence to the thought that the life of the individual or a community either can or should derive its value from the acts of consciously performed recall, from the reliving of the prototypical. Although the process of modernisation does indeed generate invented rituals as compensatory devices, the logic of modernisation erodes those conditions which make acts of ritual re-enactment, of recapitulative imitation, imaginatively possible and persuasive. For the essence of modernity is economic development, the vast transformation of society precipitated by the emergence of the capitalist world market. And capital accumulation, the ceaseless expansion of the commodity form through the market, requires the constant revolutionising of production, the ceaseless transformation of the innovative into the obsolescent. The clothes people wear, the machines they operate, the workers who service the machines, the neighborhoods they live in — all are constructed today to be dismantled tomorrow, so that they can be replaced or recycled. Integral to the accumulation of capital is the repeated intentional destruction of the built environment. Integral too is the transformation of all signs of cohesion into rapidly changing fashions of costume, language and practice. This temporality of the market and of the commodities that circulate through it generates an experience of time as quantitative and as flowing in a single direction, an experience in which each moment is different from the other by virtue of coming next, situated in a chronological succession of old and new, earlier and later. The temporality of the market thus denies the possibility that there might co-exist qualitatively distinguishable times, a profane time and a sacred time, neither of which is reducible to the other. The operation of this system brings about a massive withdrawal of credence in the possibility that there might exist forms of life that are exemplary because prototypical. The logic of capital tends to deny the capacity any longer to imagine life as a structure of exemplary recurrence.

What does this mean? He’s telling us that in modernity, the market is our god. It conditions what we imagine to be possible. We can’t dream that life should be ordered by rituals that bound and define our experience, and link it to the past, to a sacred order. There is no sacred order; there is only the here and now, the tangible. The world exists to be remade to fit our desires. There are no ways of living that we should conform our lives to, no stories that tell us how we should live. When Connerton says that in modernity, and under capitalism, we can hardly “imagine life as a structure of exemplary recurrence,” he’s saying that we can no longer easily believe that we should live according to set patterns of thought and action because they conform to eternal truths.

Note well: this is a problem common to all Americans, and all Christians. There is a “conservative” version and a “liberal” version. The conservative version tends to deny that there’s a problem at all with capitalism (or 100% American values), and is mystified why the faith and its structures keep eroding, except to blame liberal immoralists. The liberal version tends to say that the “problem” is actually a solution, celebrating individualized, relativized morality but failing to recognize how throwing aside traditional moral beliefs, practices, and structures actually accelerates the dominance of capitalism — and, overseas, is the cultural wedge of American and globalist economic and political power.

Put another way, the only way individual liberty can expand is through forgetting, both by conservatives and liberals, of the past and its hold on us. We all believe in “thou shalt not”; it’s a matter of how and where to draw the lines.

Anyway, read Richard Beck. This is going to get interesting.

(Readers, please only join this comments thread if you have something constructive to say, even if critical. No sniping, please.)

Evangelical & Benedictine

On Saturday, my friend Ryan Booth and I were sitting in folding chairs in a high school gym outside of New Orleans, waiting for Justice Antonin Scalia to arrive. I told Ryan how much I was learning for my Benedict Option project from reading the Reformed theologian Hans Boersma’s 2011 book Heavenly Participation, which is about sacramentalism.

Suddenly, a young woman sitting in front of us turned around, apologized for overhearing us, but saying that she couldn’t help asking us what we were talking about. She said that her boyfriend, an Evangelical pastor in New Orleans, had studied theology under Boersma at Regent, and was a huge admirer of Benedictine spirituality. She said he even visits the Benedictine abbey of St. Joseph’s, in Covington.

The boyfriend is Jeff Pate, pictured above, a full-time hospital chaplain and a member of the congregation at Canal Street Church in New Orleans. Jeff showed up to the talk just before Justice Scalia did. Turns out that one of his parishioners was sitting in the row in front of him and his girlfriend, and recognized me from this blog. That parishioner said that several families in his circles are thinking of moving out to St. Bernard Parish, where land devastated by Katrina is relatively cheap now, and settling in Christian community there. Fascinating! Before Scalia talked, Jeff and I had a few minutes for a short interview. From our alas-too-short chat, which I recorded:

How did you find out about Benedictine monasticism?

When I was in grad school at Regent College in Vancouver, I was introduced to the Benedictine monastery of Westminster Abbey, which is about an hour and a half outside of Vancouver. Some of our professors had told us about it, and we would sometimes do retreats out there. That’s how I was first introduced to the Benedictine way of life: their hospitality, their balance of work and prayer, their rhythm. What has become increasingly important to me is how work and prayer are sometimes the same thing. I didn’t really catch that at first.

What do you think Evangelicals have to learn from the Benedictines?

Dr. James Houston, who was a founding father of Regent, was teaching us about the importance of the recovery of the Psalms. I was introducted to that at school, and I certainly found that in the Benedictine way of life. Reading the Psalms is an everyday thing for them. We can learn from the Benedictines the recovery of Biblical prayer.

 

What about the Benedict Option? Does it appeal to you?

I think for my own life, it begins for me within my person, and carries over into  my family, and then my church. Something that would be accessible at this point is rediscovering the rhythm of prayer, the re-communion with Christ. For me, that’s where the Benedict Option starts: with prayer, in prayer-centered communities. We were just talking with a parishioner of ours a few minutes ago about education. Education is something that matters a lot to me too — educating our kids in a Christ-centered way, how that forms education. I think that’s a pretty exciting opportunity as well.

 

 

American Empire: A View From Iran

The worsening news about the Sunni-Shia tensions in the Middle East brought to mind an e-mail that a reader of this blog, Mohammad, who writes from Iran, sent to me before Christmas. I had forgotten to post it, but as I sit here worrying about a wider Mideast war breaking out, and the US being dragged in to fight for Our Friends The Saudis™, it’s worth posting Mohammad’s e-mail:

I am writing to you  to bring your attention to the following. If some of your readers have any shred of doubt about the undeniable responsibility of the USA with regard to the Syrian refugees and her role in promoting evil and havoc on this part of the world, the following might help them change their mind (if such a thing is possible for some people).

By the way, I am no fan of Ayatollahs ruling Iran, and I have been personally harmed by their actions and agenda. But no, TODAY they are not worse than the American hawks. The American hawks have replaced the worst revolutionary forces of the communism in spreading evil in the world, haven’t they?

The piece Mohammad refers to is Seymour Hersh’s latest in the London Review of Books, talking about the twisty, turny relationship between the US and Syria. Mohammad highlights these bits:

The public history of relations between the US and Syria over the past few decades has been one of enmity. Assad condemned the 9/11 attacks, but opposed the Iraq War. George W. Bush repeatedly linked Syria to the three members of his ‘axis of evil’ – Iraq, Iran and North Korea – throughout his presidency. State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks show that the Bush administration tried to destabilise Syria and that these efforts continued into the Obama years.

In December 2006, William Roebuck, then in charge of the US embassy in Damascus, filed an analysis of the ‘vulnerabilities’ of the Assad government and listed methods ‘that will improve the likelihood’ of opportunities for destabilisation. He recommended that Washington work with Saudi Arabia and Egypt to increase sectarian tension and focus on publicising ‘Syrian efforts against extremist groups’ – dissident Kurds and radical Sunni factions – ‘in a way that suggests weakness, signs of instability, and uncontrolled blowback’; and that the ‘isolation of Syria’ should be encouraged through US support of the National Salvation Front, led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian vice president whose government-in-exile in Riyadh was sponsored by the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood. Another 2006 cable showed that the embassy had spent $5 million financing dissidents who ran as independent candidates for the People’s Assembly; the payments were kept up even after it became clear that Syrian intelligence knew what was going on. A 2010 cable warned that funding for a London-based television network run by a Syrian opposition group would be viewed by the Syrian government ‘as a covert and hostile gesture toward the regime’. In December 2006, William Roebuck, then in charge of the US embassy in Damascus, filed an analysis of the ‘vulnerabilities’ of the Assad government and listed methods ‘that will improve the likelihood’ of opportunities for destabilisation.

[Emphasis Mohammad’s — RD]

He recommended that Washington work with Saudi Arabia and Egypt and focus on publicising ‘Syrian efforts against extremist groups’ – dissident Kurds and radical Sunni factions – ‘in a way that suggests weakness, signs of instability, and uncontrolled blowback’; and that the ‘isolation of Syria’ should be encouraged through US support of the National Salvation Front, led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian vice president whose government-in-exile in Riyadh was sponsored by the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood. Another 2006 cable showed that the embassy had spent $5 million financing dissidents who ran as independent candidates for the People’s Assembly; the payments were kept up even after it became clear that Syrian intelligence knew what was going on. A 2010 cable warned that funding for a London-based television network run by a Syrian opposition group would be viewed by the Syrian government ‘as a covert and hostile gesture toward the regime’.

But there is also a parallel history of shadowy co-operation between Syria and the US during the same period. The two countries collaborated against al-Qaida, their common enemy. A longtime consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command said that, after 9/11, ‘Bashar was, for years, extremely helpful to us while, in my view, we were churlish in return, and clumsy in our use of the gold he gave us. That quiet co-operation continued among some elements, even after the [Bush administration’s] decision to vilify him.’ In 2002 Assad authorised Syrian intelligence to turn over hundreds of internal files on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Germany. Later that year, Syrian intelligence foiled an attack by al-Qaida on the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and Assad agreed to provide the CIA with the name of a vital al-Qaida informant. In violation of this agreement, the CIA contacted the informant directly; he rejected the approach, and broke off relations with his Syrian handlers. Assad also secretly turned over to the US relatives of Saddam Hussein who had sought refuge in Syria, and – like America’s allies in Jordan, Egypt, Thailand and elsewhere – tortured suspected terrorists for the CIA in a Damascus prison.

You should read the entire piece. In it, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014 confirms that his agency tried to tell the Obama administration that there are no Syrian moderates, and that if Bashar Assad’s government falls, there will be hell to pay. They refused to listen. They still do. The piece also talks about the double game that Turkey has been playing.

It is chilling to think about Mohammad sitting at home in Iran right now, watching his nation and others in the region march quite possibly towards war, and to consider the role our country’s foolish invasion of Iraq and intentional destabilization of Syria plays in the looming catastrophe.

Of the leading Republican presidential candidates, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are against toppling Assad, but GOP Establishment standard-bearer Marco Rubio is all for it (see here for more). And so is Hillary Clinton, who, unlike Sanders and O’Malley, still insists that we must fight both Assad and ISIS. About this, Sy Hersh told Democracy Now!:

Look, clearly what Mr. O’Malley and Bernie Sanders said would be—would ring very solidly with the Joint Chiefs. They would be in great distress about what Hillary Clinton said, because I think—you know, the fact is that if you really want to look at it, Bashar is still the president of Syria. The Russians are bombing in Syria at his invitation. We are bombing in Syria without his invitation. And so it’s hard sometimes for Americans to think that we’re not always on the side of the angels on legal issues, but we’re certainly, by any normal standard of—you know, if there was a normal standard of international conduct, we would be the bad guys in that, just in terms of legalities. We’re not invited in. We’re doing it.

More Hersh:

Well, I think—my only thing is I think there should be learning curves for people with that kind of power. And I think what happened in Libya should have instructed anybody in the government, including the president, that when you depose a dictator, you have to be aware of what’s going to come next, and you have to think long and hard about what you’re doing. And I think, by any standard, the getting rid of Gaddafi has proven to be a horrible event. It’s increased the spread of the Islamic State in Africa, North Africa, increased their access to weapons and to money, etc. And it’s been a terrible—it was a terrible decision.

And we don’t—we seem not to have learned enough from it, because—you know, if I’m Putin, and I’m worried sick about—and forget about what happened in Ukraine. It’s terrible. I’m not defending Putin. I’m just saying, from his point of view about international terrorism, he’s seen the United States attack one secular leader, Gaddafi, destroy another secular leader, Saddam Hussein—no question that he was—he was not interested in the spread of international terrorism. Bashar, the same way, was always a secular state. There was a tremendous amount of freedom for all sorts of minorities and sects, and people don’t appreciate—all the minorities can only look to him for safety. They certainly can’t look to the international Islamic State for any sort of solace, in case they win out and take over the country. And so, if I’m Russia, I’m watching the destruction of three Syrian—or attempted destruction in Syria of three secular states and wondering what the hell is America up to.

They join with us in the worry about international terrorism. And I can’t tell you how many people I know inside the military and the intelligence community, as loyal to America as you want to be, think our first move after 9/11 probably should have been to Moscow and to say, “What can you tell us about terrorism? We’ve got it right here, and you’ve had it for a long time. Let’s talk about it.” You have to separate some issues. But we don’t seem to be very good. We seem to live in a world of propaganda and likes and dislikes above our own national interests.

It would appear that a Clinton or Rubio presidency would mean continued war in the Middle East and hostility with Russia, even at the expense of US national security interests.

I know where the reader Mohammad lives, and if there is war with Saudi Arabia and its allies, he and his family have a major target on their backs. Keep them in your prayers. This gets real personal.

 

‘Open’ Gay Marriages

Well, that didn’t take long, did it? A gay writer named Nico Lang takes to HuffPo The Daily Beast to urge married gay couples to come out with the fact that they are not monogamous. Excerpts:

Over the past decade and a half, studies from San Francisco State University and Alliant International University have found that around half of gay relationships are open. This rate is considerably higher than for heterosexual and lesbian couples, but it’s difficult to say by how much exactly, due to the widespread lack of substantive research on the subject. (After all, SFSU’s Gay Couples Study was back in 2010.)

Conservative estimates suggest that less than 1 percent of all married couples are in an open relationship, but other approximations are much higher. Back in 1983, the authors of American Couples, Phillip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, found that around 15 percent of committed partners—whether homo or heterosexual—had agreements that allowed for some degree of flexibility.

Writer and sex columnist Dan Savage famously described these arrangements as “monogamish”—“mostly monogamous, not swingers, not actively looking.” And even more couples are in them than you think. I’d say that the Alliant and SFU figures are a tad low, at least for gays. I can’t speak for lesbian couples, but few queer men I know—including myself—are in relationships that are exclusively, 100-percent monogamous. Some couples occasionally invite a third into the bedroom for a night of play, while others independently arrange their own casual hookups. Some men might even have long-term partners outside their primary relationship.

More:

In a 2013 column for Slate, Hanna Rosin called non-monogamy the gay community’s “dirty little secret,” citing a study from the ’80s, which showed that up to 82 percent of gay couples had sex with other people. That number sounds about right to me, but here’s the thing: It’s not dirty and it’s hardly a secret, at least if you know where to look.

Monogamish couples are a constant presence on apps like Grindr and Scruff, which allow gay men to connect with other men to chat or hook up. Users commonly describe themselves as “dating,” “in an open relationship,” “partnered,” or “married,” while others set up an account with their partner if they’re looking to play together.

I spoke to one couple that hasn’t let marriage get in the way of their Scruff account. Eric, 34, and Martin, 33, walked down the aisle last October after dating for five years. Like many gay couples, they were initially monogamous, although with “infrequent and informal” exceptions. “Think post-bar bathhouse outings,” Eric explained. But after creating a profile together on Scruff a few years ago, the couple agreed on a set of boundaries. “We only sleep with people together, we have to both communicate with the person to some extent before we meet up, and the guy has to very clearly be attracted to both of us,” Eric said.

Like nearly everyone I spoke to, the pair had few gay friends that were in monogamous relationships, and Martin believes it’s because there are fewer rules and expectations around gay relationships. “I think we don’t have heteronormative templates that we have to subscribe to,” Martin said. “There’s just not that same kind of pressure to be monogamous when you’re gay.”

Lang concludes his column by saying that for so long, gay men have felt burdened by having to hide the fact that they are not monogamous and do not intend to be, for fear that the truth would give opponents of gay marriage a reason to deny gays marriage rights. Now that the Supreme Court has spoken, gays ought to be up front about how they are revolutionizing our culture’s understanding of marriage.

There’s nothing we can do about this now, but hey, a lot of us trads told you so. And the Law of Merited Impossibility is as valid as it ever was.