Mark Steyn

Chronicling a whole month's travels worth of bad news - Sunday 11th of June to Saturday 15th of July

I have been travelling quite a lot over the past month, which is why I was not able to provide a weekly update. In truth, my travel began on the week starting on the Sunday of the 18th of June, but as I don't recall much of what happened that week, I'll lump that week together with the rest.

On my travels I hope to write more of in at least 2 separate posts, but the long road trip was very much enjoyable and indeed did me much spiritual good.

One of the benefits of being away was that I was in relative seclusion from the news cycle,  both the secular one and even more depressingly, the ecclesiastical one. I did manage to catch notice of a few news items, which I shall present below.

It was another bad month for what's left of Christendom as another 2 countries fell to sodomy. In Germany they passed a law recognising sodomitical unions and putting the final nail into any notion of marriage as a public good. That was sad, but not altogether surprising, given the state of the Church in Germany, as well as the general moral decline and political winds.

What was somewhat surprising to me was that Malta also fell to sodomy. This is, after all, a country which only allowed divorce some 4 years ago or something, and not with an exactly overwhelming majority, if memory serves me right. This is also a country which at the time has a more than 50% attendance at Mass. This is, however, a country which has such perverse bishops as Scicluna, of we-only-ever-need-to-listen-to-the-present-pope infamy, as well as the free-bread-for-adulterers-on-Sundays infamy. I take the chance to call it 'free bread' instead of Holy Communion because there is no reasonable chance that a bishop such as that believes in the Real Presence. I do, very much, though recognise that the sacrilege is very real because I do accept the notion that transubstantiation can occur in the Novus Ordo, given the official formula is used.

In Ireland, I was also infomed that their new sodomitical prime minister has taken charge. That was not a surprise as I had read that he was likely to be the new prime minister, but it is also striking that Ireland also only allowed divorce in the 1990s. Abortion looks very likely to follow.

In Poland, Donald Trump held a speech which was seen as much-ado-about-nothing by the Ron Paul Institute and as a ground-breaking speech by others. His optimisim for the survival of the West was not echoed by Mark Steyn though, and I do tend to agree with him that the will to survive has pretty much died out in the West. I would need more than flag-waving Poles fawning at a president who lauds them to conclude that there is enough fight to save Europe. Unfortunately, the tenacity of the Poles and some of the other mainly Catholic Eastern Europeans is more than compensated for by the suicidal tendencies of most of the other nations in the bloc.

The speech also gave me a good opportunity to note just how sad it is to see someone one thought was not a complete idiot turn out to be probably one, a person who only has a job on account of her looks, not altogether stellar either, I would hasten to add. This happened when a female commentator in response to Donald Trump's boast that he would like to see U.S. energy exports extended to such countries as Poland stated that it is nice of the president to do that, since it prevents Poland from getting it's "energy from communist countries such as Russia". This, mind you, is from a woman who seems to have been born probably not long before the fall of the Soviet Union. If one does not know that Russia is no longer a communist country, then absolutely nothing the person has to say on any issue is worth my attention, or yours either.

This was a woman on Fox News, which kind of validates the theory that the former president used to flip channels looking for new TV personalities with the sound off, just to see how good they looked on the box, without ever hearing what they had to say. It made me almost wish I had the same approach.

Vladimir Putin finally met Donald Trump, and this led to a ceasefire in parts of Syria. It's a step in the right direction, but nothing close to what the U.S. needs to do, which is at the very least to stay completely out of that war, which means in simple words to stop arming jihadists. I am not sure what else to make of the meeting as I have seen very few details of it.

Then there is the sad story of Charlie Gard, a poster boy for today's Western totalitarian state which sees no limit to its powers.

We also had Le Creep weighing in on why Africa is stuck in poverty. It is because people have 7-8 children, he says. Leaving aside that only one country in Africa has a birth rate higher than 7 - Niger - the perfect response would have been something like the following: "Well, unfortunately there is a shortage in Africa of barren women who are 25 years older than the men, so we are forced to engage in reproductive sex." That would have really put him in his place.

Now onto the Church.

I could begin no other place that with Cardinal Mũller having been relieved of his post. Evidently, there is a new policy at the Vatican of terminating posts after 5 years, and it is starting with him. According to Müller, he was called within a minute of ending his last day of his 5-year term, and was offered no explanation as to why his term was not being renewed. Well, Bergoglio is nothing if not consistent in how he handles personnel...

Denial seems to be the religion of the 'enlightened' - Sunday 28th of May to Saturday 3rd of June

There was another terrorist attack in London, and the chief Jesuit denied yet another tenet of the Catholic faith. It was another regular week in the Novus Ordo world, in other words.

I shall not waste your time or mine on the vehicular jihad and knife attack which took place on London Bridge. It is hardly worth talking about and the media hype is a bigger story than the attack. The most decent analysis has been done by Peter Hitchens, and he takes aim at the media hype regarding terrorism as well.

Truth be told, there are going to be more and more of these attacks and it serves the interests of both the Jihadis and the treacherous Western governments to have ISIS or similar organisations taking the blame. Why ISIS should take credit is obvious - it enhances their status. They have no problem breaking the 5th commandment, so surely breaking the 7th will cause them no great consternation? They get to seem bigger than they are to their adherents and admirers which helps in their recruitment and ego-stroking.

As for Western governments...The lie they sell is that there is an all-powerful organisation, which helps to mitigate their incompetence whenever a bomb goes off. Furthermore, powerful enemies demand powerful militaries, which helps them line the pockets of their friends. On top of that, in the face of an all-powerful enemy, people will be willing to give up a lot of their freedoms to be kept safe from the threat - real or imagined - so the political rulers take advantage of these fears to impose draconian and totalitarian laws.

This was all too evident with Theresa May's actions. "Enough is enough", she exclaimed, while it turns out that what she really means is that she wants to control the Internet more. This should surprise nobody, as Britain has had it for Internet freedoms, encryption and privacy for a long time. As David Wood argues, Theresa May's version of extremism includes people who warn against Islamisation and the violence within Islam, so only a madman would give her more power to control the Internet, or almost anything for that matter.

Enough about that. The take-away from this is that the U.K. is on a death-spiral against liberty, largely self-inflicted and we cannot expect the people who have got them into the mess to get them out - assuming they even want to get them out, which is an assumption which seems unwarranted.

That the top Jesuit has gone from denying the Bible to denying Christ should really suprise nobody either, so I shall not waste much time on it.

Let us simply be happy that they are now denying the truths of the faith outright and openly, so that we can easily identify them as the wolves that they are, instead of facing charges of being uncharitable when we point out that we are dealing with sodomitical heretics.

One final note on terrorism in the U.K. is worth making. There seems to be incredulence at how the U.K. government can permit known Jihadis, known ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliates, known head-choppers, to come back to their country having left to fight in Syria and Libya and elsewhere. They simply cannot see how these people can be allowed back in; "sworn trators", they have been called. This position has been pushed by many known so-called conservatives, including not least Mark Steyn adn Nigel Farage, who seem to be quite upset at it. They blame it on political correctness.

Something far more straightforward is at issue here though: The reason is simply that the Islamists fighting in Syria and Libya are seen as allies by the British and Western political classes.

Let us be honest:   the Germans, the Swedes, the British and French, none of these people are particularly concerned about the plight of Christians or other human beings in the Middle East. They are not even concerned about the safety of their citizens for crying out loud! What they seek is chaos in the Middle East, as it furthers their agenda of de-Christianising Europe, as well as hollowing out Christianity from  its ancestral home. Their primary enemy is Christianity, and in Jihadis they have able allies who can do against Christians in the Middle East what they dare not yet do against them in Europe.

On top of that, we have the issue that the largely bankrupt West - both morally and financially - needs to keep its paymasters happy, and the paymasters of its political elites are at this point in time are largely oil-rich Gulf states, opposed to the anti-Islamist power structures of the countries in question. Where Israel comes into this is unclear, but what is not unclear is the fact that the U.S. policies largely mirror the interests of Israel and Saudi Arabia, and Europe's interests parrot American interests. It is no co-incidence that the countries which have fallen in the Middle East over the past 15 or so years have been the least Islamic in these regions.

So when the jihadists are done with their killing sprees in the Middle East, carried out not only with the blessings but also with the support of Western governments, the Western countries are in the main largely happy to allow them, allies as they are, back into their countries. Whether the rulers want these jihadists to come back and wreak similar havoc at home, or whether they let them in under the mistaken belief that they will leave their blood-spilling ideologies at the border, is really anybody's guess.

If you do not understand that, then I agree that the carnage we see in Europe will make little sense. If you recognise that Jihadists in the Middle East have been fighting with Western support, however, then it is much easier to make sense of the general chaos, and tyranny, that has been unleashed upon Europe of late, or at the very least to recognise that it is not the fault...

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