Donald Trump administration

It was a relatively slow news week so I hope my summation of the week's events shall be quite brief.

In Syria, American bungling is reaching titanic levels - in the modern conception of the word "titanic".

The U.S. said that it would back a Kurdish border force, upon which Turkey promptly initiated a military campaign against Kurdish regions in northern Syria. Now the U.S. is telling Turkey that it should be careful about what it is doing there, and Turkey is responding by asking the Americans what gives them the right to be in Syria in the first place. A major political confrontation between NATO allies is at hand, and if we are lucky it could escalate to a military confrontation and help bring about the end of this out-dated organisation.

I am at times left wondering whether the American leadership - and this is no different under Trump - is simply incompetent or malicious, and I always fall back on malicious because I have a hard time believing that anybody could be as ignorant as the Americans would have to be to think that they would be able to arm a 30,000-strong Kurdish militia while expecting Turkey to sit on the sidelines watching by. My take on this is that the Americans want Turkey in Syria and in order to do this they had to provoke them into a military confrontation. The resentment from the Turks over this certainly seems genuine, so I dismiss the notion that both sides are acting.

That theory at least leaves the Americans in control of their senses, and is about as charitable as I can be towards American imperialist aggression. We cannot dismiss the notion that they are totally intellectually inept, however, and the number of flip-flops that TIllerson makes would be able to give an ordinary man whiplash.

The Syrians threatened to shoot down Turkish jets if they cross into Syria, but I doubt they will follow through on that threat, given the NATO-menace. This is why we must all hope for the quick disintegration of NATO.

The Bergoglio Vatican continues to lie to us, this time telling us that the award it gave to a pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality, pro-euthanasia Dutch politician was not done in order to honour her, but in order to insult her. No comments needed on that one.

Sticking to the most perverse pseudo-pontificate in history, we were told that Bergoglio's Vatican is asking faithful bishops in China to resign so that the Vatican can reach a deal with China to have communist-appointed bishops. The strange thing about this whole scenario is that Cardinal Zen seems to have been under the impression that Bergoglio was unaware of the Chinese Catholics being sold out. Alas, the Vatican has been quick to issue a correction to his narrative and assured us that the shenanigans of the Vatican diplomatic corps are in lock-step with the thoughts of the most openly communist pope in history.

I have pointed out before that if you do not feel betrayed by Bergoglio, then you have to question your Catholic credentials. Alas, we now know that the Chinese underground Catholics are true Catholics, because they have joined the large group of faithful Catholics which Bergoglio has sold out at one time or another.

The actor Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus Christ in the movie "The Passion of the Christ" by Mel Gibson, recently gave a speech to Catholic university students. It is well-worth watching and listening to if you can stand the annoying introduction which lasts less than 80 seconds, or simply skip the firssty 80 seconds - it's somewhat NovusOrdoist ending not withstanding. In brief, it is more Catholic than what virtually any Novus Ordo bishop in the Church has said since Vatican II. It really put our effeminate episcopacy to shame.

VoxCantoris is angry that Catholics in Canada put the most anti-Catholic ruler they have ever had in that country in power. He referenced an earlier post in which Canada's supreme court came down softly on a bestiality case. I sympathise with him, but must point out that under Anglo-Saxon custom, one can only be charged under crimes which are in the statutes. If the wording of the statutes produces undesirable or immoral outcomes, then the statute has to be changed. This is partially why we have had such broad statutes of late that virtually anybody can be found guilty of some kind of law in the Anglo-Saxon countries. That is not a suitable alternative.

A more suitable alternative would be an Old Testament kind of system in which the judges are presumed to be wise and therefore have much greater leeway in issuing their judgements. That however, reminds me of the old Soviet joke, that "if we had ham, we could make eggs and ham, if we had the eggs". One would need wise judges - who are in short supply in the West nowadays - and a moral code which is virtually universal in society, another thing which doesn't exist in 'modern' Western societies.

Finally, we were treated to a very good quote from Joseph Sobran by Laura Wood, regarding Western aggression in the Middle East:

 “Let’s face it: Christianity and Islam are eternal enemies. Each makes uncompromising claims of exclusive truth. But this doesn’t mean that the secularist-Zionist war on the Islamic world serves any Christian interest or deserves Christian support.”

I naturally agree with that completely, and it more or less sums up my view on zionist and Western secular aggression directed against non-Jews in the Middle East - many of these victims being Christians even. It would seem the zionists have co-opted the secularists and the Christian zionists (ignorant as they are of both history and theology) in a battle-of-civilisation which rests on completely false grounds - namely, that Christians and Jews stand on the same side religiously, or even morally.

We were also informed that a traditionalism-leaning monastic community in Germany was closed, and that it didn't...

The major news this week were of course the 100th anniversary of The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima. Even I took the time to write down some thougths about this great and truly unique event.

Much was written about the Fatima anniversary, the best of which was by Roberto di Mattei on Rorate Caeli, in which he went through how 9 popes have failed to consecrate Russia ever since the Fatima apparitions.

In Poland they had a Rosary Crusade of sorts, although that particular Rosary Crusade was held in honour of the Feast of the Holy Rosary, some few days earlier. The Church in Poland encouraged the event and even senior of the governments got in on the act. It is very nice to see the Carholic faith flourishing in Poland, but I do fear that Catholicism in Poland has a nationalist strain to it which tends more to be a national marker than true discipleship. I hope I am wrong, because it would be terrible if the faith in Poland went the way of the faith in Ireland, where it seems more and more as though for the majority of the Catholics, the faith was something to mark them as not being loyal subjects of an occupying power. It's difficult to analyse the collapse post-Vatican II in any other way.

While it is always good to see Rosaries being prayed, there was a political aspect to the campain in Poland and that was the anti-immigration stance. The Rosary stations formed a perimeter around the whole country, in a symbolic gesture to the EU to leave Poland alone and stop forcing Islamisation upon it.

The aim of the Poles in wanting to protect their cultural, religious and even ethnic identity is very laudable and I very much support them in that. However, I cannot but point out that it is very hypocritical of the Poles to cry when their sovereignty is threatened while at the same time supporting the attacks on the sovereignty on others.

The truth is that Poland, according to polls, is the most pro-American country in the world. I do not have any direct memory of Poland's stance, but I would be extremely surprised, even shocked, if it was to turn out that Poland had been against any of the American misadventures in Muslim countries which have acted as the catalyst for what is commonly dubbed the "refugee crisis", a very misleading label, of course. The attacks that spring most to mind are those of Iraq, Libya and most recently Syria, although we should also remember Yemen and Afghanistan, from where many of the refugees who make it to Sweden hail, for some unkown reason.

It would be one thing if the Poles resisted for some other reason, but Poland resists, and I have to argue plays the victim card, precisely because its sovereignty was attached first by the Germans, then the Soviets and now lately the EU. Given that it is precisely soverignty, territorial and cultural integrity that the U.S. has been attacking the most, with Polands presumed backing if not encouragement, I would like to argue that the Poles have no recourse to the moral high ground in their stance against the EU. Nonetheless, I do stand with Poland on that particular issue, hypocritical as the country may be.

We had Trump repealing the contraceptive mandate, among others, from the Obama regime which came before him, something very much welcomed by all non-leftists. It is a bit of a scandal that it took so long. It was actually part of a series of administrative policies which the Trump administration took which were very encouraging. It was not all plain sailing though as they for some reason still continue to defend the homosexualisation, demoralisation and immoralisation of American society by insisting that homosexuals are a protected civil rights group as defined by the Civil Rights Act, in plain contradiction of the act. The U.S. bishops, as is par for the course, have been worse than worthless on this issue and many like it.

Staying on the topic of the U.S. and the aforementioned foreign aggressions, a very interesting piece was published on the Ron Paul Institute titled "US Violence Abroad Begets Violence at Home". A new study shows that the number of deaths caused by the U.S. since the Second World War, if I undrstand the piece properly. The number of countries the U.S. has attacked is staggering, and worth remembering is that not a single one of those nations actually attacked the U.S. or posed a threat to U.S. security - as if posing a threat was in any way a justification for attacking them, it must be noted. As I wrote on the day, we have become somewhat desensitised to American brutality: "It's what they do" thinks the world, and "It's what we do", Americans seem to think, but we owe it to the victims of this violence to remember them.

The context of his piece was the recent Las Vegas massacre, whose narrative, it must be admitted, grows all the more unbelievable.

We had an article by Jennifer Lahl on egg 'donation', written by a woman who had donated her eggs. She suffered adverse effects on which she had not counted and about which she had not been informed. It was a sad read, and one thing that struck me was how bad she felt at realising that the doctors saw her as nothing but a product to produce eggs, while of course, she was there in essence facilitating the treatment of children as products through IVF technologies. It just goes to show how much trouble a little abstract thinking can save us, especially when it comes to morality.

A week's summary would hardly be complete without a Bergoglio scandal, or a Bergoglio heresy, or not infrequently both. This time it is the death penalty, which Bergoglio says...