Reflections of a stormy petrel

The narrow defeat of the Obama administration in the Hobby Lobby case has sent its supporters into ecstases of rage and hate that have to be seen to be believed, and that in some cases can only be described as murderous. I am glad I don't live in the USA. But this fury, that bewilders many conservatives and independents, does not bewilder me. The Mandate was criminal from the beginning, criminal in its prehistory. Remember how deliberately the President lied to poor Bart Stupak and destroyed his career. And the Mandate is really much more basic to the Obama project than people realize, because they can't see its actual purpose. Le me draw a historical parallel.

Ireland has one of the saddest modern histories of any country in the world. Repeatedly invaded and devastated by the larger neighbouring island, its Catholic majority was reduced to a pulverized peasantry, paying tax they could not afford to Protestant landlords and being tithed for Protestant parsons; a miserable swarm of penniless, ignorant and leaderless grubbers of the soil, fed by potatoes, with no middle class or aristocracy or any consistency. But what you have to realize is that, the destruction of the Irish educated classes, in spite of the frightful massacres and repeated wars, were not the result of military oppression or even of mass murder; they were, in the main, the result of laws. England wrote dozens, indeed hundreds,of laws, to destroy the Irish nation as elaborately and as legally as possible. As the Irish Protestant Edmund Burke said, the English laws against Irish Catholics - or "penal laws", as they are shamefully called - were "a complete system, full of coherence and consistency, well digested and well composed in all its parts. It was a machine of wise and deliberate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”

The Mass, of course, could not be said: to have it said or to say it meant life imprisonment. But neither could Catholics be educated: to set up a Catholic school was equally a matter of life imprisonment. And Catholics were to be robbed by law: "Every Roman Catholic was... to forfeit his estate to his nearest Protestant relation, until, through a profession of what he did not believe, he redeemed by his hypocrisy what the law had transferred to the kinsman as the recompense of his profligacy." The law encouraged Protestants to steal from their Catholic relations, or even pretended relations; and not just large amounts, but everything - every bit of property they had. "When thus turned out of doors from his paternal estate, he was disabled from acquiring any other by any industry, donation, or charity; but was rendered a foreigner in his native land, only because he retained the religion, along with the property, handed down to him from those who had been the old inhabitants of that land before him."

"....Catholics, condemned to beggary and to ignorance in their native land, have been obliged to learn the principles of letters, at the hazard of all their other principles, from the charity of your enemies. They have been taxed to their ruin at the pleasure of necessitous and profligate relations, and according to the measure of their necessity and profligacy,"

"Examples of this are many and affecting. Some of them are known by a friend who stands near me in this hall. It is but six or seven years since a clergyman, of the name of Malony, a man of morals, neither guilty nor accused of anything noxious to the state, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment for exercising the functions of his religion; and after lying in jail two or three years, was relieved by the mercy of government from perpetual imprisonment, on condition of perpetual banishment. A brother of the Earl of Shrewsbury, a Talbot, a name respectable in this country whilst its glory is any part of its concern, was hauled to the bar of the Old Bailey, among common felons, and only escaped the same doom, either by some error in the process, or that the wretch who brought him there could not correctly describe his person,—I now forget which. In short, the persecution would never have relented for a moment, if the judges, superseding (though with an ambiguous example) the strict rule of their artificial duty by the higher obligation of their conscience, did not constantly throw every difficulty in the way of such informers. But so ineffectual is the power of legal evasion against legal iniquity, that it was but the other day that a lady of condition, beyond the middle of life, was on the point of being stripped of her whole fortune by a near relation to whom she had been a friend and benefactor; and she must have been totally ruined, without a power of redress or mitigation from the courts of law, had not the legislature itself rushed in, and by a special act of Parliament rescued her from the injustice of its own statutes..."

It says enough about the power of brute prejudice, of a kind we see in the highest places today, that this unanswerable attack on a disgraceful law lost Burke an election he should have won. The English had been taught to hate Catholics so much that they evidently thought that nothing done to them could be wrong or unjust.

What the Mandate is designed to do, mutatis mutandis, is exactly this. This is why the political and media leadership of your country has fought for it so obstinately, so savagely, and so underhandedly; this is why it took even a narrow defeat with murderous rage. It is because the real purpose of this abomination is to exclude Christians and especially Catholics from economic life. In a world in which money is the only power that can really affect politics - as Obama and his people know all too well - it is intolerable to them that there should be a number, however small, of rich people and of company owners who take their Christianity seriously. In this day and age it is not yet possible to make it legal for a man of the government's party to simply steal the property of his dissenting relatives; and besides, there is not - or not yet - a simple test of identity to separate the government's friends from its enemies, as membership in the "Protestant" church was in Burke's time. But they can impose a tax for a purpose that no Christian can accept, and then savagely penalize them - not by jailing them, which is not what they want, but by fining them into ruin.

Look at it in this light, and the whole mechanism becomes lucid, clear, rational and perfectly designed for its purpose. It is intended to make it impossible for Christians to have any independent economic activity in the USA, by making sure that they either have to resign their principles or be taxed into bankruptcy for them. Of course, they could not possibly declare their purpose; of course they lied from beginning to end. But that, and nothing else, is what this Mandate does.

Incidentally, this also gives you an insight into the real view that Obama and his henchmen have of the political process in your country, and of the nature of political power. This law is not meant to strike at Catholic or Christian faith. It does not try to obtain conversions. It does not set up anything like the imposing apparatus by which republican France, after 1875, worked tirelessly to break the ancestral Catholicism of its masses. The only thing that matters, the thing for which they have fought, the thing for which they have lied, the thing for which they ruined Bart Stupak and compromised the word of the President of the United States of America, was to be sure that no rich Catholics or Christians should exist. Wealth had to remain exclusively among people who had no problem with paying tax to distribute IUDs and abortifacients with a shovel. Because in the eyes of Obama and his crowd, only the very rich are politically significant. This attempt to winnow the Christians from their numbers makes it perfectly clear.

...the award to Obama stops being a joke and becomes a scandal. Apparently, the defeated candidates included the following:
Chinese Human Rights Activist Hu Jia - imprisoned for campaigning for human rights in the PRC.
Wei Jingsheng, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for urging reforms of China's communist system. (Not to mention the symbolic value of awarding a Chinese dissident on the 20th Anniversary of the Tianenmen Square Massacre.)
Greg Mortenson, founder of the Central Asia Institute has built nearly 80 schools, especially for girls, in remote areas of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past 15 years.
Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, a philosophy professor in Jordan who risks his life by advocating interfaith dialogue between Jews and Muslims.
Afghan human rights activist Sima Samar. She currently leads the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and serves as the U.N. special envoy to Darfur.

And someone observed that the man who invented fibre optics - probably the most important single invention since the radio - in the sixties has only just received the Nobel Prize for Physics. When such prizes are awarded sanely, they are awarded to a career - not to a "hope".

Ever since Sarah Palin announced her resignation as Governor of Alaska,( Read more... )

I, Fabio Paolo Barbieri, the author of a blog read by a few dozen people, find myself in the ridiculous position of having to take a firm stand about a candidate in the American election, neither more nor less than if I were a newspaper or one of the real political blogs. I have been placed in this situation because a friend who is making what I regard as the wrong choice has told me that mine is one of the few "political" blogs he ever reads, so "if [he] ever heard any propaganda, it would be from [me]". So I have to clarify my position with respect to Senator Obama.

Senator Obama is the most spectacularly talented politician of the new generation in America. No wonder that the Daley machine adopted him from the start and started a presidential campaign for him from the moment he was elected to the US senate. However, he has several flaws that would make me refuse to support him even if the opposing candidates did not impress me as much as John McCain and Sarah Palin do. (With respect to Sarah Palin, incidentally, one simple principle will carry you very far: do not believe a single word the mainstream press and television say about her. Not one word. If they tell you that she has dark hair and wears glasses, make sure you check by yourself or read a conservative blog first. The amount of lies spread about her would make Josef Goebbels' jaw drop, and beats anything seen in the Western world since the sixteenth-century wars of religion. This is not a violation of Godwin's Law, by the way: I mentioned Goebbels as being the best-known political propagandist, but I might as well have spoken of Willi Muenzenberg or Giuseppe Bottai.)

Barack Obama is visibly politically inconsistent. He has ridden to the Democratic candidacy through the support of the party's hard left, and still has the unwavering and unpleasant backing of all the lunatics, from the Daily Kos leftward to various communist and islamist groupings. (One wonders about the party structure's evident support of Obama against Hillary Clinton. I suspect that the percentage points lost to Ralph Nader's leftist candidacy in the last two elections may have scarred them into resolving that this time the hard left must be kept into the party at all costs.) While this has no effect on his actual platform, which is by European standards quite moderate, it means that it is literally impossible to establish where he really will stand, when the chips are down, on any issue. (Except one: abortion. More on that later.) It is worrying to read, for instance, that he is unsatisfied with the Constitution's establishment of "merely negative" liberties; and to a person to whom the issues of poverty and stratification are very real, one can see the point. Freedom to starve to death is not much of a gift. However, it is also clear that this was Obama the intellectual thinking aloud - thinking the inconceivable, as Tony Blair once asked Frank Fields MP to do; and the realities of politics - in which Obama is already well steeped - are seen in the fact that when Frank Fields did just that, Blair promptly sacked him. I do not for a minute think that Obama wants to seriously change the Constitution by his own acts, although his choice of future federal and SCOTUS justices does worry me greatly; the point is rather that with such a candidate, one for whom there is effectively no precedent in the USA, it is - I repeat - literally impoossible to forecast, from what he has said so far, what he will actually do. Presidents are elected on character as much as on their platforms. With Obama, it is exactly that aspect of his character which is a blank. To elect him would be an act of faith at best. From most electors, it would be faith that the moderate, unifying, respectful face he has worn through the national election is the one he would take to the White House. For the Kos Kids and others who have brought him to the nomination, it would be exactly the opposite.

That is one immediate reason not to vote Obama. When you do not, repeat, do not, know how a man will perform in a demanding role, you do not give him the keys to the house or the family jewels. Even if the first impact he makes is favourable, and even if the alternative looks bleak. There are many people who think that anything would be better than eight more years of Republicanism. Some of them insist, against all the evidence - I have met them - that John McCain's destruction of the establishment candidate Mitt Romney, his visible dislike for Romney and Bush II, his record of ignoring the party views whenever he thought right, the violent propaganda aimed at him by the established right - Limbaugh, Coulter and so on - are all a nefarious conspiracy by Karl Rove and other demonic figures to lead us to accept yet another incarnation of the inevitably wicked and dishonest Republican soul. I have stopped trying to convince such people to enter the real world. They will never be convinced that everything is not a nefarious Rovian conspiracy to make them look bad. And this sort of thing is one of the reasons why I hate the party spirit. There has been a lot of talk lately about what the Founders did or did not want, but one thing should be clear: they loathed "faction" and established parties, and they were quite right to do so. When a real party structure emerged over the election of Jefferson, it did so against the wishes of nearly everyone involved. Party spirit blinds people and makes them stupid.

NOw if Obama were not the Democratic Party's official candidate, no Catholic (or Jew) would dream of voting for him. His support for abortion, the most extreme of any Senator, would make it absolutely impossible to back him. But because he is a Democrat, and because the ancient tribal identification of Dems and Catholics (especially Irish Catholics) is still alive in some minds, and because some people find Republican governance so abhorrent that they believe anything would be better, there still are supposed Catholics who can bring themselves to underline the supposed good things that the end of Republican governance would mean, and neglect the fact that abortion would be double-riveted on the land for ever. Some of them, who do not understand that the doctrine of procreation is at the centre of the whole Catholic doctrine of man, would even be relieved to see the issue closed by edict, and may imagine that the Church would then be forced to accept what it does not like. To these people one can only say that they have not the slightest notion of what Catholicism really means - or, for that matter, human conscience. Any edict in favour of abortion, such as the so-called Free Choice Act, would be as effective in closing the issue as the Dred Scott case. But at any rate the issue for members of the Catholic Church, in communion with the Bishop of Rome, subscribing to the Catholic doctrine, is absolutely simple: you either are a Catholic or an abortion supporter. Tertium non datur.

The Church, in general, likes to keep its collective head down and hates confrontations with the civil authorities. For thirty or more years, ever since the abortion bloc took over the Democratic Party, most Bishops have kept quiet on the issue. And they might still have done so, but for the unconscionable folly of some born-Catholic Democratic leaders (a folly in which Obama and his adviser Axelrod had no part, but which touches them in the person of their VP candidate), who actually took it upon themselves to try and rewrite Catholic doctrine in a direction that suited them. Faced with such a gross interference on their own teaching duty, the Bishops of America had no choice but to respond. Believe me, it takes a lot to move such a peace-minded and diplomatic fellow as Donald Wuerl of Washington DC to battle; but even he issued a clear and unambiguous condemnation of Messrs Biden and Pelosi's dogmatic effusions.

So now you do not even have the excuse of the pragmatic silence of the Church. The duty of any Catholic in this election is simple. It is not up to you to decide what the Church is supposed to believe; and if the Church tells you that abortion is a sin of special gravity, and that those who support it cannot possibly be supported by Catholics, it is not up to you to second-guess it. You can either be Catholic, or support abortion. And that means that if you do not see any possible candidate except abortionists, you should stay at home rather than stain your soul with deadly sin.

From the news, today:

Barack Obama endorses making time for thinking in the White House.

As the Democratic candidate for president chatted with Tory Leader David Cameron at the Houses of Parliament on Saturday, a boom microphone used by reporters caught their discussion. It was unclear whether Obama and Cameron knew how much of their conversation others could hear.

Obama and Cameron talked casually about the demands of high office, according to a transcript provided to reporters.

CAMERON: You should be on the beach. You need a break. Well, you need to be able to keep your head together.

OBAMA: You've got to refresh yourself.

CAMERON: Do you have a break at all?

OBAMA: I have not. I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who _ not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process _ said that, should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be ...

CAMERON: These guys just chalk your diary up.

OBAMA: Right. ... In 15 minute increments and ...

CAMERON: We call it the dentist waiting room. You have to scrap that because you've got to have time.

OBAMA: And, well, and you start making mistakes or you lose the big picture. Or you lose a sense of, I think you lose a feel ...

CAMERON: Your feeling. And that is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to make decisions.

OBAMA: That's exactly right. And the truth is that we've got a bunch of smart people, I think, who know 10 times more than we do about the specifics of the topics. And so if what you're trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante, but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you.