Dante Alighieri and the Needle of Doom

 

Dante Alighieri’s magnus opus the Divine Comedy was completed in 1320, the year before the poet’s death. Dante’s story begins on Good Friday of his thirty-fifth year.   Lost in the woods, beset by wild animals, he is rescued by the ancient Roman poet Virgil.  Virgil takes Dante on a guided tour down through the circles of the pit of Hell then up the terraces of the mountain of Purgatory where Beatrice takes over as his guide through the celestial spheres of Paradise.   The journey through each of these otherworldly realms is told in a cantica which is titled after the realm in question.   These are the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso and each contains thirty-three cantos, with an extra thirty-fourth canto in the Inferno. 

 

In the Inferno, as Virgil and Dante travel down through the nine circles of Hell, the sins and their punishments get worse.   The ninth circle is the Cocytus, the lake of ice where those guilty of treachery are sent.  The Cocytus is itself divided into four regions, the first two of which are described in the thirty-second canto.   The thirty-fourth canto brings Virgil and Dante to the Judecca, the last region of the Cocytus in which those who have betrayed their benefactors are tormented.   It is named after Judas Iscariot who, along with the other great traitors of history, Brutus and Cassius, are found at the very bottom of the pit being chewed in the mouths of the three faces of the original traitor, old Lucy himself.

 

It is the third region of the Cocytus, through which the pilgrims pass in the thirty-third canto that is of interest for the purposes of this essay, however.   This region is called the Ptolomaea after the Ptolemy who was governor of Jericho under Antiochus VII in the second century BC.   Ptolemy had failed to learn the lesson about the sacred duty of hospitality and what befalls those who sin grievously against it that was so aptly illustrated in the mythology of the land of his ancestors by the stories of the curse on the House of Atreus. (1)  He had married the daughter of Simon Thassi Maccabeus, who was the elder brother of the Judas Maccabeus who had led the successful revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes, as well as a High Priest and the first ruler of the Hasmonean Dynasty.   In 135 BC, Ptolemy invited his father-in-law to a banquet where he murdered Simon and two of his sons.  (2)  The Ptolomaea was where those who had dealt treacherously with their guests were sent to be punished.  

 

In the Ptolomaea Dante encounters Fra Alberigo of Faenza who in 1285 had invited his brother Manfred and nephew Alberghetto to a banquet.   At the banquet, Alberigo ordered figs to be brought to the table.  This was a signal to his men to fall upon the guests and kill them all.   In Hell, Fra Alberigo draws Dante’s attention to the presence of Branca d’Oria of Genoa who in 1275 had done the same thing to his father-in-law, and of whom Alberigo says “many years have passed since he was shut up in this manner.”   This, Dante finds hard to believe:

 

‘I think,’ I said to him, ‘that you deceive me;

 For Branca d’Oria has never died;

 He eats and drinks and sleeps and puts on clothes.’ (3)

 

Dante had good reason to think this.  Branca d’Oria lived a good quarter of a century after the year in which the events told in the Divine Comedy were said to have taken place, outliving the poet.   Indeed, Fra Alberigo himself was still alive in 1300, dying seven years later.

 

All of this is explained in the poem.   Fra Alberigo tells Dante, when the latter asks him “Oh…are you already dead?”:

 

How it stands with my body

In the world above, I have no knowledge here. 

For Ptolemaea has this privilege

That oftentimes a soul may sink down here

Before Atropos sends it on its way. 

And so that you may the more willingly

Remove the glaze of tears from off my face, (4)

Know, that as soon as any soul betrays, 

As I did, then his body is taken from him

By a demon, who afterwards governs it

Until his time on earth comes to an end.

The soul crashed down into the pit;

And it may be that the body of this shadow 

Who winters here behind me, is still on earth.

 

This portion of Dante’s poem is a great piece of political satire.   Dante lived and wrote in a period in which the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire were engaged in a struggle for power in northern and central Italy.   The Italians had split into rival factions, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the former supporting the papacy and the latter the Holy Roman Emperor.  Dante belonged to the Guelph faction in his native Florence, a city-state that was divided between the two factions.   Fra Alberigo was a member of a Guelph family that had been driven into exile from its Guelph city-state but later returned by making an alliance with a Ghibelline.   Branca d’Oria belonged to the Ghibelline faction of a solidly Guelph city-state.    Thus, in this episode of the Inferno Dante is not merely drawing attention to the similarity between the crimes of the two men, but is also lampooning a traitor to his own faction and a member of the rival faction by presenting them as being so wicked that their souls were already suffering in Hell while their bodies were walking around on earth.

 

I have been contemplating this passage in Dante a lot in recent days.   It seems to me that bodies, animated in the sense of walking around, talking, breathing, and eating, but devoid of their human souls is not a bad way of describing the great many in our own day who have been willing to sacrifice the basic rights and freedoms, social lives, livelihoods and mental and spiritual wellbeing of all of their family, friends, and neighbours in a vain effort to prevent the spread of the Bogeyman of the bat flu virus.   Indeed, thanks to a particular genre of science/horror fiction that has become inexplicably popular in recent decades, we now have what Dante lacked in his day, a household term, borrowed from the legends of Haitian voodoo for mindless, animated, bodies of this sort, i.e., zombies.

 

There has been much discussion among those of us who are still sane enough to oppose the heavy-handed, diabolical attempts of governments, media and big businesses to coerce people in one way or another into being injected with some concoction or another, hastily whipped together by scientists after the order of Frankenstein and Jekyll, of the potential physical hazards such as blood clots, sterility, and death.   Sadly, there has not been as much corresponding discussion of the potential metaphysical and spiritual hazards posed by the needles and their unholy contents.   Since a foetus could be said, in a way, to be a guest, a guest in its mother’s womb, abortion is, in addition to being murder, a form of treachery against a guest.   Cells obtained from an aborted foetus have, in one way or another – development, testing, manufacture – been involved in the production of these experimental bat flu vaccines.    Could this mean that one hazardous effect of the vaccines is to drive souls from their bodies into eternal torment in Hell leaving zombies to walk the earth turning all of those awful graphic novels, movies, and video games about a zombie apocalypse into an awful reality?

 

The only good argument against this theory that I can see is that all those people who have been living in mindless fear for over a year, relying upon silly totems worn over their faces to magically ward off a virus, were already behaving like zombies before they took the needle.

  

 

 (1)   Tantalus, the progenitor of the line, had invited the Olympians to a banquet where he insulted them by serving up his own son Pelops (after whom the Peloponnesus is named) as the main course.   This led to his own famous punishment in Tartarus – being immersed in a pool with grapes dangled over his head, food and water alike receding from him when he sought to satiate his hunger and thirst.   It also brought a curse upon his descendants in which the sins of the previous generations kept being re-enacted and revisited on the next.   His grandson Atreus, whose wife Aerope had cuckolded him with his brother Thyestes, took revenge on Thyestes by serving up the latter’s own children to him.   Thyestes’ son Aegisthus would eventually avenge his father by seducing Clytemnestra, the wife of Atreus’s son Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, while the latter was away leading the Greek campaign against Troy, and conspiring with her to murder Agamemnon upon his return

(2)   An account of this can be found in the sixteenth chapter of I Maccabees.

(3)   Quotations of the Divine Comedy are taken from the Oxford World Classics edition of 1998, which uses the 1980 translation by Charles H. Sisson.

(4)   This is the punishment in the Ptolemaea – the betrayers lie in the lake of ice, with their own tears freezing across their eyes.

Stanley, Chauvin, and the New Barbarism

 Three years ago, when Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley was acquitted of the charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter for having shot the twenty-two year old Colten Boushie when the latter with a posse of friends had invaded his farm, I spoke strongly against those who publicly denounced the verdict, including the Prime Minister and the  then Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould, and, indeed, said that the Prime Minister and Minister of Justice ought to resign or be made to resign over their remarks.    That I disagreed with them about the case and the verdict – I thought and still think that the RCMP were wrong to charge Stanley in the first place, that the case ought never to have made it to trial, and that “not guilty” was the only sane verdict possible – was only part of my reason for taking that stance.   There was also the fact that for Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould to politicize the verdict in the way in which they did was an abuse of their office.   Ironically, less than a year after this, Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould would find themselves on the opposite sides of a huge scandal about political interference in the affairs of the criminal justice system.   In this scandal, Wilson-Raybould accused Trudeau of inappropriately pressuring her to retroactively apply to an ongoing case certain changes that had just been snuck through Parliament by being tagged on to a spending bill so as to benefit a large corporate donor to the Liberal Party that was under prosecution for bribing a foreign government.    In this scandal, Wilson-Raybould was in the right in resisting Trudeau’s pressure but in the earlier incident, the two of them had both been guilty of political interference in the criminal justice system and in a much worse way.   As bad as politicians putting pressure on prosecutors to extend leniency may be it is far worse for them to denounce jury acquittals.   This is because doing the latter is a dangerous affront to the most basic principles of our criminal justice system, the very principles which distinguish civilized legal justice from tribal blood vengeance.   These principles prioritize the protection of the innocent over the punishment of the guilty by giving everyone the right to a fair trial when accused of a crime, placing the burden of proof upon the prosecution, and entitling the accused to a dismissal of the charges if the conditions of a fair trial cannot be met and an acquittal if the prosecution cannot meet the standard of proof.   Boushie’s family and several Native Indian organizations were taking the position that the acquittal was unjust because Native Indians were not represented on the jury due to the prospective jurors of this ethnicity having evinced prejudice against the defendant that disqualified them from performing that civic duty.   In their public display of support for this position, Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould were basically saying that the system needed to be changed to make it harder for the accused to be acquitted by weakening his right to a trial by an unbiased jury.    

 

This week the verdict was announced in the trial of Derek Chauvin.   In this case the verdict was guilty.   Chauvin was found guilty of three charges – unintentional second degree murder, third degree murder, and manslaughter – despite there having been only one body.    As strange as that seems it might perhaps simply be the latest stage in the apotheosis of George Floyd.   When Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis last year he was at first proclaimed a victim of racism and police brutality but has since climbed the ladder to martyrdom and then sainthood.     If he has now been deified and made into a trinity that would explain his death being treated as a three-in-one.    

 

Greg Gutfeld of Fox News responded to the verdict by saying “I’m glad that [Chauvin] was found guilty on all charges, even if he might not be guilty of all charges”.   The exact opposite of this is the just and sane position to take – that Chauvin should have been acquitted of all charges even if he was guilty of all charges.

 

The reason this is the only just and sane position is because of the same principles discussed with regards to the Stanley acquittal in the first paragraph.   There was not the slightest possibility of Chauvin having received a fair trial, therefore the principles of justice say that he ought not to have been tried at all and that he is entitled to be cleared of all charges.

 

As it so happens, the evidence does not support the conclusion that Chauvin was guilty of any of these charges.  Floyd had committed a crime and resisted arrest, which was why he found himself on the ground being restrained.   The knee-hold restraint Chauvin used was a nasty looking one but it was not lethal.   The police bodycam video shows that his knee was not on Floyd’s neck as it appeared from the angle of the bystander video that went viral but on his shoulder blade.   It was clearly not the reason Floyd couldn’t breathe and at any rate the video shows that Floyd’s breathing troubles had started before he was on the ground and under this restraint.   There were at least three other factors that were more likely to have contributed to his breathing difficulties than the police hold.   One of these was Floyd’s heart condition, another was the amount of fentanyl in his blood – three times higher than the dosage that nobody has ever survived.    The third factor was his infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  A difficulty in breathing is one of the main symptoms of the disease this virus produces when it bothers to produce a disease at all.   For over a year now every death that occurred to someone infected with this virus was counted a COVID-19 death even if other morbidity factors included automobile accident injuries, gunshot wounds, or being eaten by wild animals.   George Floyd, who was experiencing symptoms at the time of death that actually correlate with those known to be caused by the virus, is the sole exception of which I am aware.

 

Even if none of this was the case however and Chauvin’s knee actually had caused Floyd’s death he still should never have been charged and tried.   I don’t say this because he is a cop.   I say it because the media, professional and social, had already tried and convicted him in their own forum within a day of Floyd’s death.   If this were not sufficient in itself to preclude his ever having a fair trial before an unprejudiced jury, the long hot summer of rioting and violence in Minneapolis and other major American urban centres constituted mass intimidation of prospective jurors.   Then there was the blatant interference in the outcome of the trial by American political leaders including the present occupant of the White House and, most notoriously, Californian Congresswoman Maxine Waters.   Unlike Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould in the Stanley trial, these did not wait to make their inappropriate remarks as ex post facto commentary on the verdict, but instead made them prior to the jury’s deliberation.

 

The trials of Gerald Stanley and Derek Chauvin were heavily politicized due to the racial aspect of the trials.  Stanley and Chauvin are white men, Colten Boushie was a Native Indian and George Floyd was black.   To the progressive commentators, activists, and politicians who politicized these trials, this was all that was necessary to come to the conclusion that racially-motivated murder had been committed.   All this demonstrates, however, is just how toxic the racist ideology of progressives has become.   When you politicize a trial in this way, refusing to allow the courts to do their job and decide the outcome based on law and evidence, but instead demand a guilty verdict for reasons of racial politics, the consequence of your own actions is that the only just outcome of the trial is dismissal or an acquittal regardless of actual guilt or innocence on the part of the accused.   A guilty verdict, under these circumstances, would amount to a lynching.

 

The principles that I have defended in this essay are the principles that underlie justice in civilization.   While those who have been demanding Chauvin’s head have been framing their demands in terms of “racial justice” this is not really justice in the civilized sense of the term at all, but a tribal blood vengeance that elevates blood and skin colour over law, evidence, rights and due process.   This is a sign indicating a rapid slide into barbarism, one of several that we have seen recently.  The insane drive to erase history (1) which kicked into high gear at the same time and in conjunction with the George Floyd riots is another.   Ironically, the institution that the Left, seizing the opportunity afforded them by George Floyd’s death, sought to indict alongside the man Chauvin, the police, is also indicative of the decay of civilization into barbarism.   In this case it is the slower, more gradual, decay over the course of the Modern era that is indicated.   The police in the modern sense of the term is a semi-military force employed by government to spy on its own people in order to terrorize them into obedience.   Like the near ubiquitous false equation of democracy – mob rule – with constitutionally restrained government, the police are an indication of how we have gradually moved from civilization towards barbarism in its totalitarian form in the Modern era.  (2)   What we are seeing now in the racialized bloodlust against Chauvin is a much faster move into barbarism in its anarchistic form.   Both forms of barbarism are equally undesirable with the paradoxical combination of the two, which the late Sam Francis dubbed anarcho-tyranny, being the worst of all barbarisms.   This is the barbarism into which we are rapidly descending.

 

(1)   While the past itself cannot be erased, history, as John Lukacs defined it, “the remembered past” can.

(2)   Totalitarianism is the idea that we, our lives, and our persons are the property of the state which has the right to do with us whatever it wishes.  It is a Modern idea, the reverse side of the coin of Modern democracy, the idea that the people are collectively sovereign and the state is the voice of the people.  The Modern concept of democracy is not compatible with the civilized ideal of constitutional limits or restraints on government.  Totalitarianism is its inevitable logical conclusion.   The civilized ideal is compatible only with the ancient, prescriptive, institutions of monarchy and parliament.   In practice, totalitarianism requires the Modern police to impose the “general will” of the people.   This is why totalitarian states are often called police states.   The police, by contrast with the civilized institutions of monarchy and parliament, is a fundamentally barbaric institution, which is one reason why it tends to draw bullies, thugs, and other low-life scum into its ranks, offering them a quasi-legitimate venue for indulging their violent and criminal tendencies.    Ironically, Derek Chauvin may very well be one of the few police officers who does not deserve to spend the rest of his life in gaol.

Abundantly Degenerate Liberals

 

The Anti-Defamation League has been in the news again.   When, two years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic) was hit by a series of scandals concerning such matters as its dubious fundraising, amassed wealth, and deliciously ironic allegations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment leading to the firing of its founder Morris Dees and the resignation of its president Richard Levin, I hoped that some similar fate would befall the ADL.   Sadly, this hope failed to materialize.   Indeed, it might be said that in this period in which the SPLC’s reputation has sunk to an all-time low, the ADL’s influence has soared to new heights.   Due, presumably, to its new director’s connections to Silicon Valley, the ADL has been working alongside Big Tech to censor online speech and purge the internet of opinions of which it disapproves, a campaign that has turned into a blitzkrieg of thought suppression in the course of the last year.   It has now declared war on Tucker Carlson, the most popular talk show host on FOX News, basically for being the only mainstream television news persona with the stones to speak the unvarnished truth about immigration.

 

The Anti-Defamation League is decades older than the SPLC and is, to the best of my knowledge, the very first organization of this type to have been founded.   Whereas most self-appointed, full-time, anti-racist watchdogs sprung up after World War II, during and after the American Civil Rights Movement, in order to capitalize on that era’s wave of popular sentiment against racism, the ADL predates the First World War going all the way back to 1913.   While it is popular among some of the ADL’s foremost critics on the right today to maintain that the organization started well but got sidetracked during the tenure of its current director who had been a special assistant to Barack Obama, in reality the organization started out bad and became worse.

 

The ADL started out operating under the Chicago branch of the B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant), a fraternal philanthropic organization that could roughly be said to be the equivalent for Jews of what the Knights of Columbus are for Roman Catholics.   Its founders were two Chicago lawyers, Adolf Kraus who was the president of the order at the time, and Sigmund Livingston who became the first president of the ADL.   Its stated purpose was to combat the defamation of the Jewish people in particular, and ultimately “to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens”.   This, as good and noble as it sounds, was a mere façade.  Apart from the fact that the ADL has never seemed to have any qualms about lying about (defaming) its enemies, thus making a mockery of its own name, throughout its history it has blurred the distinction between unfair and unjust words and acts towards Jews qua Jews and justifiable criticism of the same, just as it has blurred the distinction between criticism of Jews qua Jews whether unfair or justifiable and criticism of individuals who are Jewish on the basis of their words and deeds as individuals.   It has also been susceptible to the charge of promoting Christophobia, which, of course, contradicts the second part of its purpose statement.

 

With regards to the first of these points, consider the incident that sparked the founding of the ADL in the first place.   Earlier in 1913, Leo Frank, the factory supervisor of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia was convicted of murdering 13 year old Mary Phagan, an employee of the factory who had been found raped and strangled in its basement.   Frank was the president of the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and the story became the subject of contentious discussion throughout the United States.   Powerful Jewish individuals in the American northeast such as Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, and Albert Lasker, the Chicago based advertising baron (he had just become the head of Lord and Thomas which became Foote, Cone & Belding) , became convinced, or at least took the public position, that Frank was innocent and was being railroaded for anti-Semitic reasons.   The founders of the ADL were of the same persuasion and today their interpretation of these events is taken as established in the history books.   It is curious though, that fabricated evidence at the site of the murder pointed to the black nightwatchman Newt Less, and the man whom the supporters of Frank’s innocence maintain was the real culprit, the janitor James Conley whose testimony to being Frank’s accomplice helped convict him, was also black.   For the ADL’s interpretation of the incident to be correct, it would require that in the city of Atlanta, Georgia at the height of Jim Crow, anti-Semitism so trumped anti-black prejudice that a white man was framed for the rape and murder of a 13 year old white girl by a black man, because the white man was of the Jewish faith.   The story did not end with Frank’s conviction.  He appealed, with Lasker covering much of his legal fees, and eventually his sentence was commuted from death to life imprisonment.   About two years after his original conviction he was kidnapped from prison and lynched to death near Phagan’s home town.   An ugly ending to the story for sure, but it reinforces the point.   How likely is it that in the Georgia of 1915 a white man would be lynched for a crime of this nature perpetrated by a black man?

 

I have given much detail about the Frank case because of its instrumentality in the founding of the ADL but it is hardly an isolated incident.   In 1982 the ADL hosted a posh luncheon ceremony in which the legendary sharp-tongued comedian and actress Joan Rivers in an unusually teary-eyed and sentimental performance for her presented the “Torch of Liberty” award on their behalf to one Morris B. “Moe” Dalitz.   A few years later they would name him “Philanthropist of the Year”.   Dalitz, who had made a fortune in bootlegging and illegal gambling during the Prohibition era, had taken his ill-gotten gains and invested them in legal casinos in Las Vegas, where he later expanded his legitimate business interests into a more general property development, earning himself the nickname “Mr. Las Vegas”.   In the post-World War II era he carefully constructed for himself the image of a reformed gangster turned legitimate businessman which he fiercely defended, famously suing Penthouse magazine in the 1970s for an article that maintained that a country club and spa resort that he had built near San Diego was built with mob money and serviced a mob clientele.   Dalitz dropped the suit after the magazine published a letter of apology, although by Rolling Stone’s 1976 account of the case the defendants appeared to have been winning the suit.  A more serious allegation was that beneath his veneer of legitimacy he was the head of operations for the Las Vegas branch of the activities of his life-long friend Meyer Lansky.   Lansky, who died the year after Dalitz received the award from the ADL, was the co-founder, with his best friend Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel whom he later had killed, of Murder Inc., and who went on with Charles “Lucky” Luciano to build the National Crime Syndicate.   He was the biggest mobster in the United States for half of the twentieth century and his criminal empire stretched around the globe.    Siegel had run Lansky’s Las Vegas operations until his murder in 1947, and Dalitz, who began investing in Las Vegas casinos around that same time, was widely believed to have been his successor.    Indeed, there have been allegations that the ADL itself basically functioned as a public relations firm for Lansky and while the ADL never honoured Lansky, who lacked a respectable public image, the way it did Dalitz, and Lansky does not seem to have directly donated to the ADL in his own name (many of his most prominent associates, Dalitz among them, however were substantial donors), there is plenty of circumstantial grounds for believing these allegations to be not entirely false.   At any rate, the ADL had always been quick to make charges of anti-Semitism against those who concentrated on Lansky, Siegel, Dalitz, etc. in exposing organized crime.

 

With regards to the second point, the ADL’s promotion of Christophobia, this has been evident throughout the history of the organization but became especially prominent during the directorship of Abraham H. Foxman, who succeeded Nathan Perlmutter in that role in 1987 and continued as director until his retirement in 2015.   In 1999, Foxman attacked the Rev. Jerry Falwell for saying that the Antichrist would be a Jewish male.   Regardless of whether one agrees with Falwell’s understanding of Bible prophecy or not, this was hardly an anti-Semitic statement but a logical implication of the very idea of the Antichrist – the devil’s counterfeit of the true Christ who will arise in the last days as the ultimate villain of history.   A counterfeit is a fake that is intended to be passed off as the real thing imitates.   Therefore it has to be as close to the real thing as possible.   Thus, that the ultimate counterfeit of the Messiah would have to be Jewish, can be logically deduced not only from Christian theology, which correctly asserts that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the true Christ, but from Jewish theology, which denies this truth but certainly teaches that the awaited Messiah will be Jewish.   It does not require the belief that the Jews are the source of all evil, are the worst evil in the world, or any other such nonsense, and indeed, obviously contradicts such crudities because it is based upon the ultimate God-sent Deliverer being Jewish.      Foxman, however, betrayed no capacity for understanding these points.

 

A few years later Foxman began attacking Mel Gibson over his film The Passion of the Christ.   The attacks began long before the film was released and before Foxman had even seen it.   Foxman condemned the movie as anti-Semitic because it portrayed the Gospel accounts of the betrayal, trial, and crucifixion of Christ accurately – to the point of using the actual tongues of the day with English translations in subtitles – without altering the story to place 100% of the blame for the crucifixion on the Roman authorities and excusing the Pharisees, the chief priests, and the Jerusalem mob.   For Foxman, irrational though this false dichotomy be, it was either place all the blame for the crucifixion on the Romans and completely exonerate the Jewish leaders of two millennia ago or place all the blame for the crucifixion on all Jews of all times including those alive today.   Underlying this irrational point of view was the idea that traditional, historical, Scriptural Christianity had been discredited by the Holocaust- despite the obvious fact that the Third Reich was the product of the shift away from Christianity in Modern German culture - and that therefore Christianity had to change its beliefs, wherever Jews found them to be offensive, even if this involved falsifying the facts of history as recorded in Christianity’s sacred texts of the New Testament.   When groups like the ADL speak of meaningful interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews this is precisely what they mean by it – a one-way discussion in which Jews speak, Christians listen, and then Christians make whatever changes to their own faith and practice that  Jews demand.   Those like Mel Gibson who are too traditionalist to go along with this nonsense are then vilified and condemned.   When, several years later, the actor in a state of inebriation went into a tirade against the Jews, Foxman gloated that he, that is Foxman, had been vindicated in his accusations, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect, or of the simple fact that after years of being subjected to Foxman’s style of abuse, which included unbelievably arrogant demands that Gibson denounce his own father (a traditionalist Roman Catholic who rejected Vatican II, pointed to by ADL types as the prime example of a positive outcome of the kind of interfaith “dialogue” described above), if anyone was justified it was Gibson in his tirade and not Foxman by it.  

 

Abe Foxman retired from his official position at the ADL, if not from his career as America’s foremost equine rump impressionist, six years ago, but the organization can hardly be said to have improved under the leadership of his successor, Jonathan Greenblatt, whose previous gigs included corporate executive and Obama administration advisor, and who looks like someone who crawls out of his parents’ basement only to do a bad cosplay of Lex Luthor at comic book conventions.   Under Greenblatt’s leadership the ADL has moved much further to the Left than it was even under Foxman.  Foxman was a liberal, for sure, but at the beginning of his tenure as National Director the ADL commissioned Harvey Klehr’s 1988 survey of Communist subversive groups in the United States published by Transaction as Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today, something that it would be difficult to imagine the ADL doing under the current leadership.   Daniel Greenfield, Shillman Journalist Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (sic), has done an excellent job of documenting the ADL’s further-Left shift under Greenblatt at the Center’s e-zine Frontpagemag, including the ADL’s strange new alliance with the segments of the Far Left that are rather less than friendly towards either Israel or the Jews (see here, here and here for examples).

 

It is Greenblatt who in his capacity as ADL CEO has been writing letters and giving interviews on CNN, demanding that FOX News fire Tucker Carlson for having the audacity to use the word “replacement” in criticizing liberal immigration policy in the United States.   “White supremacists”, use that word after all, and to use a word that “white supremacists” use is to fully embrace and endorse everything “white supremacists” believe, just as to be in the same room as a “white supremacist” or breathe the same air as a “white supremacist” is to implicate yourself in his ideology.   Absurd as that sort of “argument” is, it is what has passed for logic at the ADL for decades, long before Greenblatt took over.   Anybody who has perused the profiles they have put together of people they have accused of “racism”, “hate”, etc. over the years, will recognize the style.

 

Lachlan Murdoch has, so far, stood by Carlson and refused to give in to the ADL’s demands.   Let us hope that he continues to do so.   There are not many today who have the courage to withstand the ADL’s bullying and intimidation tactics for long, just as there are very few willing to speak the truths that Tucker Carlson has been speaking.

 

If Murdoch is willing to stand by Carlson for the long haul, then perhaps it is time for FOX News to go on the offensive, and shine the light of exposure upon the bullying, lies, and corruption of the ADL.

  

HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, R.I.P.

Friday morning of last week came with the sad news that His Royal Highness, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh had passed away.   Just as Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, is the longest reigning monarch in the long history of that ancient, time-honoured, and trustworthy institution, so her husband the Duke had been the longest to serve in the role of royal consort.   He was ninety-nine years old and was just two months minus a day short of having reached his centennial.

 

Prince Philip was born into the House of Glücksburg (Mountbatten, the surname he adopted upon becoming a British citizen, is the Anglicized form of his mother’s family name).   This is still the reigning House of Denmark and at the time of his birth also reigned over his native Greece.   His uncle, King Constantine I was forced to abdicate when the Greco-Turkish war ended in Turkish victory and revolutionary elements within the Greek army forced the king to take the blame for the defeat.   This happened when Prince Philip was one year old.   The entire family was sent into exile and so the prince was raised in France and the United Kingdom.   In 1939, while training for the Royal Navy, he met Princess Elizabeth.   They fell in love and corresponded throughout the Second World War in which he served in the Royal Navy with valour and distinction.  The year after the war ended he asked King George VI for her hand in marriage.  The engagement was officially announced the following year and the two were wed in November of 1947 at Westminster Abbey.   The same day, he was made the Duke of Edinburgh.   He continued in the Royal Navy until 1952 when he was called to a higher duty.   The royal couple had just embarked on a tour of Commonwealth when word reached them that King George had passed away.   They returned to London, where Elizabeth was crowned Queen and Philip pledged to be her “liege man of life and limb”.

 

The Duke kept that oath faithfully all of his life.  He aided and assisted the Queen in her ceremonial duties of state and provided her with strength and support in their family life.    As she herself put it he was her “constant strength and guide”.    The two complemented each other so well that it is as difficult – impossible, really -  to imagine what the reign of Elizabeth II would have looked like without Prince Philip by her side as it is to imagine what the reign of the first Elizabeth might have looked like had she had a consort.

 

Prince Philip understood the institution that the Queen embodies and serves as well as she does herself.   In a visit to this Dominion in 1969 he said “It is a complete misconception to imagine that the monarchy exists in the interests of the monarch.   It doesn’t.   It exists in the interests of the people.”    What the Prince did not say on this occasion, but which is just as true, is that this is something which pure democracies and republics, for all their talk about government “of the people, for the people, and by the people” can never provide.  Pure democracies and republics can only give a country government by elected politicians, and elected politicians are by definition office-seekers who are in it primarily for their own selfish interests rather than those of the public.   Only monarchy can give a country the kind of devoted, dutiful, service that the Queen, with Prince Philip by her side, has provided to the Commonwealth Realms for sixty-nine years.   Prince Philip did not say any of this, of course, but rather spoke graciously of the alternatives, because had it been said in this context by anyone in his position it would have undermined his statement about monarchy existing in the interests of the people.   What this statement means is that monarchy is all about duty and service, something that Prince Philip exemplified in his own life, as has the Queen.  

 

We Her Majesty’s loyal subjects, throughout the Dominion of Canada and the other Realms of the Commonwealth as well as the United Kingdom, join with her and the Royal Family, in mourning the loss of Prince Philip.

 

May he rest in peace.

Christ Has Died, Christ is Risen, Christ Will Come Again!

This past Sunday was the most important holy festival in the Christian calendar.   Set by the Council of Nicaea to fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, (1) it celebrates the Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour and is variously called Pascha (the Christian Passover), Easter and Resurrection Sunday.    The previous week was Holy Week, which began with Palm Sunday, the commemoration of Jesus’ formal triumphant entry into Jerusalem on a donkey in fulfilment of prophecy, and which ended with the Great Paschal Triduum.   On the evening of Maundy Thursday we remembered the Last Supper, in which the Lord washed His disciples’ feet, instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and was betrayed by Judas leading directly to the event remembered on Good Friday, His Crucifixion at the hands of ungodly men in which He bore the sins of the world for which offered up His own shed blood and death as Atonement.    Good Friday was followed by Holy Saturday, the day of the Easter Vigil in memory of the period of His body’s entombment and His descent as Conqueror into the underworld where He smashed the gates of Hell to smithereens.  The Vigil, the Triduum, and all of Holy Week found their culmination in Easter itself and the new dawn of the Resurrection.

 

Did your church choose to mark this Easter by meeting at midnight, with the church draped in black and its air thick with sulfurous incense, and chanting obscenities within an inverted pentagram while raping and killing a naked virgin on an altar before a statue of Baphomet?

 

I very much suspect that for most of you – I would hope for all of you – that the answer is “no”.   Nevertheless, I ask this offensive question in order to make a point.

 

If your church turned people away from the celebration of the Resurrection, limited those who it permitted to attend its Easter services, told those that did come that they had to cover their faces, that they could not sing Alleluia in praise of the Risen One, at least without wearing a mask, forbade hugs and handshakes and any other form of normal human contact, and told the majority of its parishioners that they would have to watch the few allowed to meet on the internet and  pretend that they were participating by following along at home, this was no less odious a blasphemous mockery than the kind of despicable rite described above.

 

Churches that have enacted these so-called “safety protocols” have done so at the behest of public health officials.   In other words they have deemed, contrary to the Apostles, it better to obey man than to obey God.    They have chosen to walk not by faith but by fear – fear of the very enemy that Christ taught His disciples not to fear.

 

Of the enemies that assail mankind, body and soul, the last that shall be destroyed, St. Paul tells us, is death.   While it is the last enemy to be destroyed it is the also the first to have been defeated.   The chapter in which St. Paul declares death to be the last enemy to be destroyed is the fifteenth of his first epistle to the Corinthians, a chapter devoted to the connection between Christ’s defeat of death in His Own Resurrection and the final destruction of death in the Final Resurrection.   The Christian believer is promised repeatedly throughout the Scriptures that he will share in the resurrection life of His Saviour, both in the sense of spiritual regeneration in this life and in the sense of bodily resurrection on the Last Day.   The Christian’s hope of his own future resurrection is built upon his faith in Christ and His historical Resurrection.

 

Since Easter is the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, His historical triumph over death, which we are to trust in as our own triumph over death and the foundation of our hope of future resurrection, to celebrate Easter while cowering behind a facemask is to deny by our actions the faith we profess with our lips and to make a grotesque mockery of it.    These masks are symbols of irrational fear generated by media hype over a new virus/respiratory disease and of how that fear has caused us to give medical doctors and public health officials the kind of trust and obedience which we owe to God alone.   Giving these medical doctors and public health officials our trust and obedience is tantamount to placing our faith in the spirit that motivates and energizes them.   Since they have declared commerce, including commerce in narcotics and liquor but excluding small, locally-owned, family retailers and restaurants, to be essential, while forbidding family gatherings and worship services for the larger part of a year as non-essential, and have been holding  our constitutional rights and freedoms and the resumption of normal, human, social existence hostage in order to blackmail us all into allowing them to inject us with an experimental new form of gene therapy developed from research using the cells of butchered babies, it is fairly obvious who that spirit is don’t you think?

 

The Christ Who rose from the grave on the first Easter ascended to the right hand of His Father.   One day He will return.   When He came the first time, He did so in humility, to be our Saviour.   The second time He will come in glory “to judge both the quick and the dead”.   On that day, when the blood of His enemies flows as high as the horses’ bridles, what can those who are now forbidding participation in His pubic worship, fellowship in His Church, and denying access to His Sacraments to all but those who register in advance and agree to cover their faces in fear, expect to receive from Him?    Shall they be welcomed to partake of the Wedding Supper of the Paschal Lamb?   Or shall they be forced to drink from the cup filled with the vintage of the winepress of God’s wrath?

 

Christ is Risen!

Happy Easter!

 

 (1)   The Resurrection occurred on the Sunday after the Jewish Passover.   The Jewish Passover fell on the Ides (the full moon at the middle of a lunar month) of Nisan, also called Aviv, the spring month in the Jewish calendar.   Hence the method of calculating its anniversary.