protest

I'll admit that I have not been following what has been happening in Ukraine. For some reason though, the protests have made a lot of coverage on Swedish media outlets (T.V., which are the only ones which catch my attention). I generally avoid the news, since I firmly believe that it is better to be uninformed than misinformed, and I have come to the conclusion that the media is more interested in misinformation than truth. By and large the only times I watch the media are when I know of something that has happened and I am keen to see how it will be reported.

The protests in Ukraine have been a good example of what I normally press home (no pun intended) - that one really ought not to watch anything on T.V., or read about it in mainstream newspapers, that one is not interested in following up later through other outlets. I know for certain that there have been protests in France - through alternative outlets and thanks to a parishioner who is French. I know that many of these have been far larger than anything that we have seen in Ukraine. Over the last few weeks whenever I have heard of a protest in France, I have tried to watch the news and see if it will be covered. Not a single time have I seen them reporting on the protests in France, yet the Ukraine makes news daily. I am not implying that this event has not been covered, but simply that whenever I have tuned into news, there has been nothing about France and much about Ukraine, even when the protests in France have been much larger. Today, for instance, TV4 reported that the protests in Ukraine were large - around 70,000 (it didn't look like it on the images they showed, and I am in no mood to take them at face value). Evidently, over the past week we had protests which the French government estimated at 80,000 but which protesters seem to claim were far larger. Nonetheless, if we take the government figure, we still have something which is still larger than the figure we have on the Ukraine, yet I have heard not a word of what has happened in France.

Since I have not been following events in Ukraine much, I have been unwilling to pick sides. I am, however, generally sceptical about 'popular' protests, knowing as I do how crowds are often manipulated and how the media often spins a narrative totally different than the truth. I do know that some Catholic bishops in the Ukraine have more or less taken sides with the protesters, but I have long given up trusting blindly in bishops (although the bishops in Ukraine seem to be at least very orthodox in terms of faith and morals, from what little I have read of the situation in Ukraine, and I particularly like the current leader). That Cardinal Dolan of New York, who has so pussy-footed arround the gross moral violations of his own country's government would come out in support of the Ukrainian protesters I found very strange indeed. Here is a man who claims that he would not bar politicians from receiving Holy Communion, in direct contravention to what the Church teaches, mind  you.

Anyway, back to the point: The situation in Ukraine has not been described to me. What the Swedish media claim is that the protesters are protesting against moves by the Ukrainian government to move Eastwards towards Russia - evidently the government signed some agreements a few months ago with Russia. They seem to want it to move Westwards towards the EU. What I cannot fathom is why foreign agents should support protesters who are trying to scupper government policy in an area in which the government has full competence, legitimacy and authority to decide. If it really is as bad as they claim, why can they not wait until the next elections and depose the government? It is not as though the government is trying to defy natural law - redefining what a man and a woman is, when life begins, what a family is, invading on the rights of the family and so on, all areas in which the government has zero competence and where protest (even violent, I would argue) would be legitimate.

From what little I know, it seems as though the protests are being orchestrated by foreign agents, agents which wish to keep Ukraine as a pawn in their power game with Russia. This was indeed confirmed over the past week with the leaking of a tape recording between American diplomats, in which they seem to openly discuss how to raise the profile of the opposition and how to get the American foreign minister involved to rile up the troops (presumably U.S. diplomats, and not the protesters on the ground). This really only confiemed what I have been thinking all along - that the protests are by and large manipulated from abroad, or at the very least that the EU and the U.S. are instigators.

It seems to be a clear case of interfering with the domestic politics of a country which has chosen a different path than the one prescribed by the globalists of the U.S. and the EU, and only for that reason.

To be honest, the penny had dropped for me earlier than that. Only a few days before that both he U.S. and the EU publicly decided to support the opposition and if there is anything that history has taught us over that last 15 or so years, it is that whenever the U.S. or the EU take a side in another country, we can pretty much be guaranteed that the side they have chosen is the one of greater evil (especially with the current U.S. administration but really this pattern is administration-neutral). If both the EU and the U.S.  pick the same side then you have...

So we had this feminist group Femen invading the Cathedral in Stockholm and staging a semi-nude protest just before Mass. Evidently, these women have just about enough brains to strip topless and show off their mammaries, although not always enough to spell out their protest properly. At least they managed to spell properly this time.

The slogan "Catholic Church out of my body" - I am at a loss to know what that means. Has the Catholic Church ever been inside a woman's body? I'm just curious.

We had a similar protest in Russia a while back and while a lot of people - including our mainly thoughtless celebrities - were making all sorts of stunts urging for the release of the protesters on that occasion, I was very keen to stress that violation of sacred space is one of the most egregious crimes we can have against a population. The Russian protesters received only about 2  years for their crime, and I argued it should have been much more because a hard precedent needs to be set. For the religious person, violation of sacred space is a more vicious crime than breaking and entering into one's own  home, and unless a government wants to send the message that it's a free-for-all on attacking each other's religious sites, tough punishments have to follow, and short of destroying a place of worship there can be no hardly be a greater violation than a protest of the kind that those women staged.

In fact, protests inside churches seem to be the fashion nowadays as similar sacrilege has been observed in Spain and France over recent years, and the authorities seem intent on encouraging it, or at the very least maintaining an undignified silence over it.

With that in mind, I was intrigued to see that the comment on the Metro piece was "Metro har sökt Katolska Kyrkan i Stockholm för en kommentar", which translates roughly to "Metro has sought the Catholic Church in Stockholm for comments". I was struck that it was not something on the lines of "Metro has sought the police department for comments" because I would have thought that this at the very least qualifies as an act of public disturbace - in which case the police should be sought out to find out what they are going to do about the crime - but the comment is quite telling because the media has come to accept the Catholic Church as fair game and its followers as people who more or less can never be seen as victims.

Another text worthy of comment is "Efter ett tag tvingades kvinnorna ut ur kyrkan av personal och åskådare" which translates roughly to "After a while the women were forced out of the church by personnel and spectators/onlookers". I do wonder whether the standards of journalism have sunk so low that we cannot even expect a journalist for a major outlet to know that when believers congregate, they do it to worship and not merely to spectate over an event, and that the proper term for Christians gathered in worship is worshipper, congregant, believer or something of the like; words which do not lack Swedish equivalents.

In fairness, with the banalisation of Christian worship over the last 60 or so years - although it has to be admitted that the Catholic liturgy in Sweden is generally of a high calibre -, it is not that surprising that somebody not raised a Christian (which I presume he wasn't) would equate Christian worship with just any old secular event. Nonetheless, I would still expect someone with any decent amout of professional integrity to make the proper distinction between a mere spectator event and a Catholic Mass, or at the very least be curious about why people were gathered in the first place - a 5-minute Internet search would certainly be enough to form that impression and having formed that impression, the congregants would surely not be labeled mere spectators.

The proper response to this kind of incident, would of course, have been to detain these women until the police came to take them away. Alas, this does not appear to have happened and they were simply escorted outside, no doubt so they can prepare for more rebel-rousing desecration, seeing as it is a consequence-free act. In any case, given the queerness of the Swedish legal system, detaining them would probably have seen the Catholic church hit with an abduction charge, so maybe the congregants were right to take the 'safe' option.

Obviously this was nothing other than a publicity stunt - the Catholic Church is quite small in Sweden, and its leadership not particularly vocal against anti-life and anti-family measures, and the text was even in English to ensure maximum exposure (pun intended) - and for that reason, it almost pains me to afford it any attention, but with thoughtless feminism on the march we can expect more and more of this kind of non-sense, and the sort of righteous outrage I have over this kind of of demonic demonstration implores me to at the very least catalogue it whenever it happens.