Who loves you, baby?

[fpb]

Everybody agrees that Londoners showed amazing inner strength under fire two days ago, and that all the rescue services performed outstandingly. The town's performance may well be seen as a major defeat for the terrorists. So their allies in the media have swung into action. Today's edition of the Channel 4 early evening news used every moment it did not devote to crawling admiration of the terrorists' brilliant organization and remarkably successful butchery to a lengthy set of varations on horror, disgust and grisliness. We are at war, and anyone who saw this performance will be clear that they were trying to play up the enemy's power and skill and encourage their spectators to fear them. Why this sort of abject moral surrender should take place I do not know, but it seems clear that Britain's Channel 4 News should be retitled "Channel 4 - a wholly-owned subsidiary of Al Qaida".

Comments

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

Much of the media in Great Britain behaves in the same way as 97% of the American media. They are virulently anti-war-at-all-costs Leftists. Most of the Left has one method of promotion: fear. Fear works.

Fear doesn't require thought. Fear ignores reason. Fear ignores history. Fear is reaction, primal and quite often reilable. Fear is an easy button to push. Fear sells papers and grabs viewers.

For the bulk of the American press, to even suggest that any kind of 'victory' could be had against the terrorists/Wahabbis/Saudis/Islamic Fundamentalists would be to say that maybe George W. Bush isn't a wrong-thinking, theocratic, holy-roller, cowboy, 11 IQ, gun-totin' redneck, that maybe -- just maybe -- he is doing something right, and the notion that he is wrong on everything from what socks he wears on any given day to his pronunciation to the 'War on Terror' is sacrosanct. It cannot be suggested otherwise, on pain of excommunication or worse -- not being liked and thought of as 'enlightened' by colleagues.

Londoners and New Yorkers, Brits and Yanks, are done disservice every hour of every day by their respective press, and I believe the press do it knowingly.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Add the Italian press to the count, and, from what I heard, the French. The Italian press, however, has recently suffered a historical trouncing, compared with which even Bush's victory last year is a small matter.

It's like this. Italy has very restrictive laws about IVF and assited reproduction - not, however, restrictive enough for the Church, that opposes the whole business root and branch. On the other hand, the Italian secularist left wanted them expanded. They proposed four national referenda (the Italian Constitution allows the use of popular referenda, not to pass new laws, but to strike down laws or parts of laws already passed by Parliament) whose overall result would have been to wholly liberalize artificial fertilization. Faced with the distasteful choice of supporting laws it did not love, the Church went for a high-risk strategy: voiding the referenda by asking people not to vote. One vote less than 50% of the electorate makes a referendum invalid, whatever the results.

Only Italians have a very high regard for the vote. They regard it as a civic duty, like paying tax, and national elections regularly have over 80%-plus turnouts. Well, the Church mobilized. Dozens of academics, hundreds of competent people, engaged in a capillary ground-level action of information, explaining to the Cahtolic public exactly what was at issue. Eminent non-Catholic persons, agnostics, Jews, atheists, joined forces with the Church. Written material was made available to anyone who wanted to read it.

On the opposite side, not only the whole of the left and of the media apparatus, but a considerable minority of the governing Right coalition, mobilizied its resources for a "yes" vote. Nobody in the political spectrum took the side of the Church; even supposedly Catholic politicians declared that they were going to vote, if only to vote "no".

The result was the biggest triumph in the history of the modern Italian Church. Come referendum day, 74.5% of the electorate stayed home; a percentage literally without comparison in Italian history. It was a titanic rejection of the whole agenda of the referenda, for or against. As a Catholic journalist said (the referenda, like all Italian elections, fell on a Sunday), for every person who voted, two went to Mass.

The Italian secularists and media establishment, I tell you, are still running around in circles, holding their heads, convinced that the sky has fallen on them. As, in a sense, it has. Many of them show a bitterness about the electoral process that shows how little respect for democracy they really have, in spite of all their chatter. They have had it brutally disproved to them that success for all their pet causes is their birthright, the due of the Goddess of History to them; and they cannot adapt to the notion. Nor do they realize that if we Catholics reacted to defeat in the democratic process as they do, divorce and abortion would long since have been wiped from the statute book by force of arms. But we accept the principle of democracy; and leftists and secularists, by and at large, do not. No wonder that they feel so spiritually close to Al Qaida and other Muslim "insurgents".

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

Wow. I'd heard that the IVF referendum was a defeat for its proponents and the left in Italy, but I'd not idea it was so severely so.

You are quite correct about the Left and its seeming proximity to Al-Qaeda and other terrorists in regards to outlook on democracy. It has been my experience and observation that despite all the commotion and do to show how lofty their democratic ideals that elitists and ideologues have nothing but contempt for the masses (i.e. the body of democracy).

The Democrats in America are clutching desperately at any straws they can find over their defeats in 2000, 2002 and 2004. Gay marriage referenda in several states in 2004 came out to be a resounding defeat for them, and they still can't concede that it may possibly be because most Americans don't favor it. If it weren't for the hatred of Republicans, hatred of most Christians and hatred of the president, the several factions that make up the Democratic Party in America would've split up already.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And Canada's Il-Liberals and Zapatero's mob in Spain both absolutely refused the mere idea of a referendum. Why? Guess what: they fucking knew they would lose it. And the Church in Spain has had a good look at what the Church in Italy has just done, and is thinking about applying the lessons learned in Italy. Mr.Zapatero is going to have an interesting time ahead of him.

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

Good.

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

What I mean by "Good" is "It is good that Zapatero & Co. are going to have an interesting time ahead" of them. I hope it is a winding, politically perilous 88-degree upward grade, accompanied by gusts of poor public opinion bordering on gale force.

[chthonya]

the referenda, like all Italian elections, fell on a Sunday

Why is that? I was in Italy that weekend and did a double-take when I saw the dates on the election posters - I wouldn't have expected such a Catholic country to have elections on Sundays...?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have expected such a Catholic country to have elections on Sundays...?
1) United Italy was founded by anti-clericals and Freemasons, at war - and I mean a shooting war - with the Pope, who was then King of Rome and of most of central Italy. Every stage of unification (1859, 1860, 1870) meant a loss of territory for him, until the new Italian state seized Rome itself and made it its own capital. Until the Treaty of Reconciliation of 1929, the Church refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Italian State, to the point that whenever the King visited a city, the local Bishop took care to be somewhere else. That is where the enduring (and, on the whole, healthy) anti-clerical strain in Italian life comes from. The Catholic victory in the famous elections of April 18, 1948, was no less a revolution than the rise of Fascism before it, or indeed Unity itself.
2) Italians, as I said, regard voting as a civic duty. It is a day in which the voter reconnects with the State, almost a kind of swearing again allegiance. To have it on a weekday would feel kind of flat. It needs a good, impressive, ceremonial date.
3) Commonsense dictates that to maximize the number of voters, you want them to be summoned when they are not working.
4) We are Catholic, not Welsh Presbyterian. And Catholicism is not and has never been fanatically sabbatarian. "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." Remember the famous Irish habit of adjourning straight from Mass to the pub? Sunday was always regarded as a suitable day not only for worhsip, but also for family life, convivial meetings - people on Sundays regularly visit each other and dine together - and entertainment; most Italian sports fixtures are on Sunday.