I have been sent the following:
Look beyond the Troubles and address social breakdown, urges new report
It has been 12 years since the Northern Ireland Assembly was formed to provide stability for the Province. It is now time to look beyond the Troubles of the past 40 years and address its crippling levels of social breakdown, warns a major new report from an influential centre-right think-tank.
The Centre for Social Justice, supported by local adviser Ian Parsley, freely acknowledges that the sectarian strife that has plagued the Province until recently has exacerbated the five drivers of poverty identified by its previous seminal research – welfare dependency, family breakdown, educational failure, drug and alcohol addiction, and debt.
But it argues that the time has come for the people and the politicians of the country to move on from the past and make a concerted attempt to create a healthier society.
The CSJ report, Breakthrough Northern Ireland to be launched in Belfast on September 2nd, paints a grim picture of social breakdown in the Province, marked by high levels of worklessness, family breakdown, mental illness and addiction.
The study also found many instances of outstanding work by volunteers and communities in Northern Ireland from which the rest of the UK can learn, and which place Northern Ireland in a better position to tackle some of the most difficult issues.
“The political system in Northern Ireland, primarily concerned with the necessity of delivering political stability, must begin to provide answers to the severe social problems outlined here, with the aim of reversing intergenerational social breakdown.
“Although the hallmarks of conflict remain important factors in social breakdown in Northern Ireland, many people face issues entirely in common with social problems across the UK as a whole,” the report says.
Key findings highlighting the extent of social breakdown in Ulster include:
• The highest level of economic inactivity in the UK
• Unemployment has more than doubled in the last two years
• Over half of those claiming income support have done so for more than five years
• One in five households is a single parent family
• Three in four single parent families live in poverty – 63,000 children.
• Widespread mental illness with nearly 50,000 men and women in Northern Ireland out of work because of mental and behavioural disorders
• More than one in 10 35-64-year-olds on antidepressants
• 30,000 people using cannabis every month
• Rate of cannabis use up 50 per cent from 2002 to 2006
• Drug-related deaths up 100-fold in the last 40 years
• Among 18-29-year-olds, 72 per cent of men and 57 per cent of women binge drink at least once a week
• Divorce rate is more than five times the level of 40 years ago
But some parts of Northern Ireland suffer far worse levels of breakdown than the national picture.
For instance, in the Water Works ward in North Belfast nearly four in five births are to unmarried mothers, nearly half the adult population has never married and two thirds of people had no or low qualifications.
The CSJ argues that the social ills of Northern Ireland are not irreversible.
By promoting stronger families, through for instance reform of the tax and benefits system and by bringing in programmes such as early intervention to help troubled families, by tackling educational failure and by placing recovery at the heart of addiction treatment, the cycle of social decay can be broken.
Gavin Poole, CSJ Executive Director, said: “Our work that identifies five pathways to poverty also provides effective solutions. Family breakdown needs family stability. Failure of education needs to be transformed into success. Reforming welfare will tackle intergenerational dependency and lack of aspiration by making work pay and releasing its wider benefits. Effective recovery programmes set people free from addiction.
“Although social breakdown may be more pronounced in a society marred by a legacy of social division and conflict, the urgent need to tackle the causes of poverty remains the same.”
For media inquiries, please contact Nick Wood of Media Intelligence Partners Ltd on 07889 617003 or 0203 008 8146
NOTES TO EDITORS
The Centre for Social Justice is an independent think tank established, by Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP in 2004, to seek effective solutions to the poverty that blights parts of Britain.
In July 2007 the group published Breakthrough Britain. Ending the Costs of Social Breakdown. The paper presented over 190 policy proposals aimed at ending the growing social divide in Britain.
Subsequent reports have put forward proposals for reform of the police, prisons, social housing, the asylum system and family law. Other reports have dealt with street gangs and early intervention to help families with young children.
The Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP stood down as Chairman of the Centre on his appointment as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in May 2010 and is now the Founder and Patron.
Nick Wood of Media Intelligence Partners Ltd on 07889 617003 or 0203 008 8146
What a searing indictment of the carve-up of Northern Ireland between a bizarre fundamentalist sect and a Marxist guerrilla organisation, the archetype of the "centre ground" politics of which we are all supposed to approve, but which is in fact a carve-up between that sect's old allies on the 1980s Radical Right and those guerrillas' old allies on the 1970s sectarian Left.
A key point in that carve-up was the removal, conducted almost entirely on television, of the Leader who had taken the Conservative Party to parity and beyond in the polls, and made it the largest party in local government, on a programme of social justice and national sovereignty, a programme which threatened to turn the 2005 Election into the proper contest that, with his removal, it was prevented from becoming.
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Counter-Counterculture
Septimus Waugh reviews The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade, by Gerard DeGroot:
I am a “Baby Boomer,” and my parents belong to the “Duck and Cover” generation. Baby Boomers were the product of increased copulative opportunities afforded by the end of the Second World War, and the Duck and Covers, having unleashed the power of the atom bomb, lived in guilty fear that another power—namely the Russians—might return the compliment. I remember dragging my Baby Boomer body up to my bedroom and blubbing after hearing a somewhat flippant Duck and Cover conversation between my parents at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Apparently we were all going to die because there was about to be an atomic war.
Baby Boomers were the youth of the 1960s, and a large section of The Sixties Unplugged deals with the youth “happenings” and movements that started in reaction to the Cold War caution of our parents’ generation. For us, this book has particular resonance, made stronger by DeGroot’s attitude to history. In an article entitled “When Nothing Happened” in The Journal of Mundane Behaviour, he argued that the writing of history is too influenced by what is interesting and newsworthy to be a true reflection of the past, which is made up of the boring and humdrum events of survival. By concentrating on extraordinary events, historians, he complained, were pandering to myth, though to tell the true tale of the past would be boring.
DeGroot’s historical method could be summed up as “describe and debunk,” an entertaining approach that involves telling the myth with all its excitement, producing some good jokes by way of debunking it, and adding a few mundane details made fascinating by their setting.
Enjoyable irrelevancies are sprinkled through this book, like seasoning on a delicious dish. In an essay on the genesis of the transistor radio, DeGroot reveals that, when the Japanese electronics firm Totsuko—forerunner of Sony—discovered that true marketability lay in being pocketsize, it had shirts made for its salesmen with pockets large enough to fit Totsuko radios. These nuggets provide good gossip material for ageing Baby Boomers, if only we can retain the information long enough to reach the dinner table.
DeGroot points out that very few of us ever went near the great sixties happenings. A miniscule percentage made it to Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury. Those who attended the Grosvenor Square riots in England, the Chicago convention riots, or the Berkeley sit-in would be statistically nonexistent as representatives of our generation. What we all share, however, is the myth of what happened, propagated for us by the newspapers and journalists. We have been content with that myth, convincing ourselves in the retelling that we were witnesses.
My 1960s were spent largely in a monastic boarding school in the west of England. There, like the Lady of Shallot, my school chums and I could but glimpse the events of the outside world as in a mirror. By 1968, however, two of the events dealt with by this book had impinged enough to affect our small community: the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and the Second Vatican Council. One enterprising boy, apparently inspired by protests against the war, collected up all our military uniforms on the eve of a general inspection by some military bigwig and flung them into the school swimming pool. The shock waves were palpable. The astonishment was even greater, though, when a young monk, nicknamed Kev the Rev, irrupted on a religious instruction class to tell us that the pope’s Humanae Vitae pronouncement was a load of bunkum. At the time we were appalled that a monk could so disrespect a pope. We had no clue that the revolutionary Dom Kevin was heretically defying the Holy Father’s pronouncement on contraception—a subject that was not on the curriculum. The penny finally dropped while reading DeGroot’s excellent essay debunking the mythology of the Second Vatican Council.
The last gasp of the 1960s passed me by because I went from the monastery to teach in a Catholic mission school in Tanzania, from which the trials and tribulations of the youth of Europe and America were even more remote. So I really am one of the great majority that DeGroot describes whose view of the past is not informed by the historical events recorded in his book but whose image of the world has been formed by the standard reportage of those events.
An essay on the sexual mores of the sixties relieved a long-held anxiety: had I somehow missed out on all that free love? “Sixties sexual rebels seldom made love,” DeGroot notes, “They f----d.” I had done neither. Those like myself who were too “uptight” to partake will be gratified by the horrified descriptions of orgies and recantations by former free-love advocates contained in this book. One of many well-chosen and pithy quotes comes from Beryl Bainbridge on the subject of the pill: “In spite of all the scientific advances there wasn’t a pill invented, and we women knew it, that could stop your heart from being broken.” What balm to the monogamous soul.
DeGroot tells the story of the sixties with great pace and verve, organizing his material, in the way of soap operas, to hold the interest of as wide an audience as possible. The story of the United States’ growing involvement in Vietnam is interspersed with and interrupted by chapters on the civil-rights movement. Light relief is provided by chapters on Europe: one on the brawl between the foppish Mods and the dirty Rockers in Margate, England introduces the more socially challenging Watts riots in Los Angeles during that long hot summer.
At each end of the book are two entertaining essays on the juridical treatment of obscenity: the trial of Penguin for publishing an unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover started the sixties, and the Oz magazine’s “school kid’s issue” trial ended them. In his essay on the Lady Chatterley case, DeGroot quotes the prosecutor’s description of his modus operandi: “I put my feet up on the desk and start reading. If I get an erection we prosecute” and notes wryly, “On that standard, Chatterley seemed a filthy book worthy of a ban.”
DeGroot, an American, is much more charitable about the youth movements of Europe than those of America, toward whom he is amusingly and uniformly censorious. I suspect that it is a case of familiarity breeding contempt. Discussing the Port Huron declaration by the Students for a Democratic Society at the start of the sixties, he writes, “The decade produced few documents more boring, but S.D.S. activists, being dull, loved it.” When dealing with the Yippees, Weathermen, and Black Panthers, his prose becomes incandescent with disgust. Mods, on the other hand, merely amuse him, and he is polite about Marxist European revolutionaries such as Rudi Dutschke and Danny Cohn-Bendit. He positively approves, moreover, of the police-baiting antics of the Dutch Provos. The Provos were peaceful anarchists who carried out a series of “white campaigns,” the first of which entailed placing white bicycles around Amsterdam for the use of whoever wished to ride them. The police foolishly confiscated the bicycles because they offended their sense of order, whereupon the Provos unleashed a series of “white rumor” campaigns threatening enormous demonstrations against the police. The gullible Dutch law enforcers fell for them, put Amsterdam under a state of emergency, and annoyed the Dutch populace considerably with an absurd show of force, especially after no demonstrations materialized. The Provos’ campaigns were peculiarly effective. The Amsterdam city council took to providing free bicycles for the use of its citizenry, and the Dutch police learned the error of their ways and became the most liberal and relaxed police force in the world.
There is a darker side to this book, intent as it is on showing us that our rose-tinted view of the sixties is an illusion. DeGroot points out the massacres that we never knew about. Tlatelolco in Mexico, for example, was the scene of the slaughter of 200 or so protesters by the Mexican army on the eve of the 1968 Olympics. In comparison, the notorious Sharpeville massacre in South Africa pales into insignificance. The Mexicans effectively hid the incident from world view, while in another part of the world, Indonesia, the CIA and the British Foreign Service managed to cover up the extent of the killings that happened as Suharto ousted Sukarno.
I left Tanzania in 1969, wearing a Mao suit with a translation of the Little Red Book in the pocket, firm in the illusion that China would lead the world to a better future. DeGroot’s portrait of the Orient in the sixties has finally hammered home the horror of the Cultural Revolution, though I am not entirely convinced of the veracity of his assertion, harvested from the Internet, that the cafeteria of Wuxuan Revolutionary Committee had human flesh on its menu. Is DeGroot merely replacing one myth with another? But even if some of his stories have to be taken with a pinch of salt, this book is a wonderful fusion feast for anyone who picks it up.
I am a “Baby Boomer,” and my parents belong to the “Duck and Cover” generation. Baby Boomers were the product of increased copulative opportunities afforded by the end of the Second World War, and the Duck and Covers, having unleashed the power of the atom bomb, lived in guilty fear that another power—namely the Russians—might return the compliment. I remember dragging my Baby Boomer body up to my bedroom and blubbing after hearing a somewhat flippant Duck and Cover conversation between my parents at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Apparently we were all going to die because there was about to be an atomic war.
Baby Boomers were the youth of the 1960s, and a large section of The Sixties Unplugged deals with the youth “happenings” and movements that started in reaction to the Cold War caution of our parents’ generation. For us, this book has particular resonance, made stronger by DeGroot’s attitude to history. In an article entitled “When Nothing Happened” in The Journal of Mundane Behaviour, he argued that the writing of history is too influenced by what is interesting and newsworthy to be a true reflection of the past, which is made up of the boring and humdrum events of survival. By concentrating on extraordinary events, historians, he complained, were pandering to myth, though to tell the true tale of the past would be boring.
DeGroot’s historical method could be summed up as “describe and debunk,” an entertaining approach that involves telling the myth with all its excitement, producing some good jokes by way of debunking it, and adding a few mundane details made fascinating by their setting.
Enjoyable irrelevancies are sprinkled through this book, like seasoning on a delicious dish. In an essay on the genesis of the transistor radio, DeGroot reveals that, when the Japanese electronics firm Totsuko—forerunner of Sony—discovered that true marketability lay in being pocketsize, it had shirts made for its salesmen with pockets large enough to fit Totsuko radios. These nuggets provide good gossip material for ageing Baby Boomers, if only we can retain the information long enough to reach the dinner table.
DeGroot points out that very few of us ever went near the great sixties happenings. A miniscule percentage made it to Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury. Those who attended the Grosvenor Square riots in England, the Chicago convention riots, or the Berkeley sit-in would be statistically nonexistent as representatives of our generation. What we all share, however, is the myth of what happened, propagated for us by the newspapers and journalists. We have been content with that myth, convincing ourselves in the retelling that we were witnesses.
My 1960s were spent largely in a monastic boarding school in the west of England. There, like the Lady of Shallot, my school chums and I could but glimpse the events of the outside world as in a mirror. By 1968, however, two of the events dealt with by this book had impinged enough to affect our small community: the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and the Second Vatican Council. One enterprising boy, apparently inspired by protests against the war, collected up all our military uniforms on the eve of a general inspection by some military bigwig and flung them into the school swimming pool. The shock waves were palpable. The astonishment was even greater, though, when a young monk, nicknamed Kev the Rev, irrupted on a religious instruction class to tell us that the pope’s Humanae Vitae pronouncement was a load of bunkum. At the time we were appalled that a monk could so disrespect a pope. We had no clue that the revolutionary Dom Kevin was heretically defying the Holy Father’s pronouncement on contraception—a subject that was not on the curriculum. The penny finally dropped while reading DeGroot’s excellent essay debunking the mythology of the Second Vatican Council.
The last gasp of the 1960s passed me by because I went from the monastery to teach in a Catholic mission school in Tanzania, from which the trials and tribulations of the youth of Europe and America were even more remote. So I really am one of the great majority that DeGroot describes whose view of the past is not informed by the historical events recorded in his book but whose image of the world has been formed by the standard reportage of those events.
An essay on the sexual mores of the sixties relieved a long-held anxiety: had I somehow missed out on all that free love? “Sixties sexual rebels seldom made love,” DeGroot notes, “They f----d.” I had done neither. Those like myself who were too “uptight” to partake will be gratified by the horrified descriptions of orgies and recantations by former free-love advocates contained in this book. One of many well-chosen and pithy quotes comes from Beryl Bainbridge on the subject of the pill: “In spite of all the scientific advances there wasn’t a pill invented, and we women knew it, that could stop your heart from being broken.” What balm to the monogamous soul.
DeGroot tells the story of the sixties with great pace and verve, organizing his material, in the way of soap operas, to hold the interest of as wide an audience as possible. The story of the United States’ growing involvement in Vietnam is interspersed with and interrupted by chapters on the civil-rights movement. Light relief is provided by chapters on Europe: one on the brawl between the foppish Mods and the dirty Rockers in Margate, England introduces the more socially challenging Watts riots in Los Angeles during that long hot summer.
At each end of the book are two entertaining essays on the juridical treatment of obscenity: the trial of Penguin for publishing an unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover started the sixties, and the Oz magazine’s “school kid’s issue” trial ended them. In his essay on the Lady Chatterley case, DeGroot quotes the prosecutor’s description of his modus operandi: “I put my feet up on the desk and start reading. If I get an erection we prosecute” and notes wryly, “On that standard, Chatterley seemed a filthy book worthy of a ban.”
DeGroot, an American, is much more charitable about the youth movements of Europe than those of America, toward whom he is amusingly and uniformly censorious. I suspect that it is a case of familiarity breeding contempt. Discussing the Port Huron declaration by the Students for a Democratic Society at the start of the sixties, he writes, “The decade produced few documents more boring, but S.D.S. activists, being dull, loved it.” When dealing with the Yippees, Weathermen, and Black Panthers, his prose becomes incandescent with disgust. Mods, on the other hand, merely amuse him, and he is polite about Marxist European revolutionaries such as Rudi Dutschke and Danny Cohn-Bendit. He positively approves, moreover, of the police-baiting antics of the Dutch Provos. The Provos were peaceful anarchists who carried out a series of “white campaigns,” the first of which entailed placing white bicycles around Amsterdam for the use of whoever wished to ride them. The police foolishly confiscated the bicycles because they offended their sense of order, whereupon the Provos unleashed a series of “white rumor” campaigns threatening enormous demonstrations against the police. The gullible Dutch law enforcers fell for them, put Amsterdam under a state of emergency, and annoyed the Dutch populace considerably with an absurd show of force, especially after no demonstrations materialized. The Provos’ campaigns were peculiarly effective. The Amsterdam city council took to providing free bicycles for the use of its citizenry, and the Dutch police learned the error of their ways and became the most liberal and relaxed police force in the world.
There is a darker side to this book, intent as it is on showing us that our rose-tinted view of the sixties is an illusion. DeGroot points out the massacres that we never knew about. Tlatelolco in Mexico, for example, was the scene of the slaughter of 200 or so protesters by the Mexican army on the eve of the 1968 Olympics. In comparison, the notorious Sharpeville massacre in South Africa pales into insignificance. The Mexicans effectively hid the incident from world view, while in another part of the world, Indonesia, the CIA and the British Foreign Service managed to cover up the extent of the killings that happened as Suharto ousted Sukarno.
I left Tanzania in 1969, wearing a Mao suit with a translation of the Little Red Book in the pocket, firm in the illusion that China would lead the world to a better future. DeGroot’s portrait of the Orient in the sixties has finally hammered home the horror of the Cultural Revolution, though I am not entirely convinced of the veracity of his assertion, harvested from the Internet, that the cafeteria of Wuxuan Revolutionary Committee had human flesh on its menu. Is DeGroot merely replacing one myth with another? But even if some of his stories have to be taken with a pinch of salt, this book is a wonderful fusion feast for anyone who picks it up.
Beck, Christianity, And Social Justice
Daniel Larison writes:
Ross:
“To the extent that this theological chasm can be bridged, though, the obvious place to fling out a rope bridge is the question of America’s providential purpose, since both Mormonism and evangelicalism (especially in their more populist manifestations) often incline toward highly-theologized readings of American history, the founding fathers, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, etc.”
In other words, when Mormons and evangelicals are at their worst and are indulging their least admirable tendencies to idolize the country at the expense of their religious teachings, there is a chance for them to find common ground. If you think that a serious religious revival in America might have something to do with a spirit of repentance and humility rather than with an extravaganza of validation and national self-congratulation, that is really a very damning indictment of what Beck is doing. As Joe Carter correctly says, “As Moore notes, the problem isn’t really Beck. The problem is believers trading the true faith for the syncretism of Christian-flavored civic religion.”
On a related point that Moore may or may not have had in mind when he was writing his post, Beck has previously framed his opposition to progressivism in Christianity in terms of ridiculing the idea of social justice. Certainly, some understanding of social justice isn’t the whole of Christian teaching, and social activism certainly isn’t a substitute for faith and participation in the life of God, but one would have a hard time persuading many serious and theologically conservative Catholics and Mennonites, among others, that social justice is not a major Christian priority. His total rejection of social justice doesn’t make any sense within the LDS church’s tradition or within the Christian tradition. If one insists on identifying the idea of social justice with the most political expressions of liberation theology, as Beck wants to do, a broad, rich tradition of the Church’s concern for the poor and dispossessed is simply cast aside, and so is a significant part of his own church’s social teachings. People may be buying Beck’s revivalism right now, but in the process they are selling their birthright for a mess of pottage.
On a more political note, it’s not as if conservatives cannot talk about social justice. Does Beck remember Pat Buchanan’s The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy? Was that just another kind of liberation theology? To put it that way is to show Beck’s conceit in this case to be empty.
P.S. After I mentioned this post to my wife, she said she thought Beck reminded her a bit of Gaius Baltar, and this comparison made some sense. Inasmuch as he is simply validating his audience’s way of life, it does seem to be very much like Baltar’s “we are all perfect just as we are,” which makes the entire exercise that much worse.
As surely as the readers of Melanie Phillips may end up organising themselves into some sort of Judaism (Julie Burchill has dropped similar hints), with or without Phillips herself, so Beck's readers, viewers and listeners may end up converting, as he did, to the only form of religion in which Manifest Destiny makes sense as anything other than an add-on and an aberration.
And as surely as a Phillipsian or Burchillian neo-Judaism would be quite unlike any existing form (none of your kosher food laws or women in the gallery, but none of your Reform views on social and political issues, either), so a Beckian Mormonism would be something quite different from that taught by the grand old men of Salt Lake City.
That ought to be impossible, since being a Mormon means submitting to the authority of the Prophet and First President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But they already tolerate Beck himself, as we tolerate certain high-profile neoconservative converts, although Fr Neuhaus, at least, did seem to be coming round by the end, and might very well have done so in the end.
Bringing us to that which is really sought by those who seek that fullness of Christianity which includes priesthood, a high theology of baptism, a living earthly Teaching Office focused in a person on this earth, an intercessory relationship between those on this side of bodily death and those on the other side of it, and so much else besides.
Ross:
“To the extent that this theological chasm can be bridged, though, the obvious place to fling out a rope bridge is the question of America’s providential purpose, since both Mormonism and evangelicalism (especially in their more populist manifestations) often incline toward highly-theologized readings of American history, the founding fathers, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, etc.”
In other words, when Mormons and evangelicals are at their worst and are indulging their least admirable tendencies to idolize the country at the expense of their religious teachings, there is a chance for them to find common ground. If you think that a serious religious revival in America might have something to do with a spirit of repentance and humility rather than with an extravaganza of validation and national self-congratulation, that is really a very damning indictment of what Beck is doing. As Joe Carter correctly says, “As Moore notes, the problem isn’t really Beck. The problem is believers trading the true faith for the syncretism of Christian-flavored civic religion.”
On a related point that Moore may or may not have had in mind when he was writing his post, Beck has previously framed his opposition to progressivism in Christianity in terms of ridiculing the idea of social justice. Certainly, some understanding of social justice isn’t the whole of Christian teaching, and social activism certainly isn’t a substitute for faith and participation in the life of God, but one would have a hard time persuading many serious and theologically conservative Catholics and Mennonites, among others, that social justice is not a major Christian priority. His total rejection of social justice doesn’t make any sense within the LDS church’s tradition or within the Christian tradition. If one insists on identifying the idea of social justice with the most political expressions of liberation theology, as Beck wants to do, a broad, rich tradition of the Church’s concern for the poor and dispossessed is simply cast aside, and so is a significant part of his own church’s social teachings. People may be buying Beck’s revivalism right now, but in the process they are selling their birthright for a mess of pottage.
On a more political note, it’s not as if conservatives cannot talk about social justice. Does Beck remember Pat Buchanan’s The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy? Was that just another kind of liberation theology? To put it that way is to show Beck’s conceit in this case to be empty.
P.S. After I mentioned this post to my wife, she said she thought Beck reminded her a bit of Gaius Baltar, and this comparison made some sense. Inasmuch as he is simply validating his audience’s way of life, it does seem to be very much like Baltar’s “we are all perfect just as we are,” which makes the entire exercise that much worse.
As surely as the readers of Melanie Phillips may end up organising themselves into some sort of Judaism (Julie Burchill has dropped similar hints), with or without Phillips herself, so Beck's readers, viewers and listeners may end up converting, as he did, to the only form of religion in which Manifest Destiny makes sense as anything other than an add-on and an aberration.
And as surely as a Phillipsian or Burchillian neo-Judaism would be quite unlike any existing form (none of your kosher food laws or women in the gallery, but none of your Reform views on social and political issues, either), so a Beckian Mormonism would be something quite different from that taught by the grand old men of Salt Lake City.
That ought to be impossible, since being a Mormon means submitting to the authority of the Prophet and First President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But they already tolerate Beck himself, as we tolerate certain high-profile neoconservative converts, although Fr Neuhaus, at least, did seem to be coming round by the end, and might very well have done so in the end.
Bringing us to that which is really sought by those who seek that fullness of Christianity which includes priesthood, a high theology of baptism, a living earthly Teaching Office focused in a person on this earth, an intercessory relationship between those on this side of bodily death and those on the other side of it, and so much else besides.
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
Once A Bennite
"We deviated a millimetre." Yes, dear. You don't learn, do you? At least no one now has any excuse for failing to appreciate the real roots and the true character of New Labour.
Now that he is no longer anywhere near the running of anything, it is actually quite nice to know that Tony Blair is still as barking mad as ever. It is like knowing that Songs of Praise or Casualty is still on, even if you yourself would never watch it. Blair really, truly, honestly believes that Labour lost the 2010 Election because it was not sufficiently committed to privatisation, warmongering, and the persecution of the old and the sick. Bless.
What does Blair even know about winning elections? After the death of John Smith, those who seized control of the Labour Party erased the fact that the combined Labour and SDP votes had been larger than the Conservative vote both in 1983 and in 1987. Such people still deny outright that the opinion poll rating that was the 1997 result had not varied since Golden Wednesday, 16th September 1992. There were swings of 1997 proportions in the European Elections just after Smith's death, i.e., under the leadership of Margaret Beckett.
Among those of us who have been active in the Labour Party in County Durham, it is common knowledge that Blair had been about to announce his departure from Parliament at the General Election then expected to be called in 1996, but Smith's death changed his mind, at least conditional on his victory in the consequent Leadership Election. In 1992, only the most obsessive political anorak had ever even heard of Tony Blair. And that was still the case on Golden Wednesday, when the Conservative defeat, and thus the Labour "victory" by default, became a done deal. Only in 2005 did Blair finally influence a General Election result at all. Specifically, he lost Labour 100 seats that any other Labour Leader would have saved. Thus he moved from being a mere irrelevance to being a positive liability.
Meanwhile, yet another horrendous health figure for the North East. Not just in health, but across the board, those starry-eyed souls who want David Miliband "because he is a North East MP" need to ask what the hell the last North East MP to be Prime Minister ever did for us. We didn't get 1980s-style boarded up shop fronts when the banks went under. We never stopped having them, including throughout the Premiership of Tony Blair. When is anyone going to start talking about the proposals of Ed Balls on housing? Or of Andy Burnham on tax reform and on care in old age? Or of Diane Abbott on the railways, on civil liberties, and on peace? We live in hope that tonight's Channel Four News will provide such fare for people who are interested in politics, with BBC Two serving up Blair for people who are not.
Still, let him have the last word:
"Of course, I had no knowledge that John would die prematurely. Except that, in a strange way, I began to think he might... I said to (Cherie): 'If John dies, I will be leader, not Gordon. And somehow, I think this will happen. I just think it will.' Is that a premonition? Not in a strict sense; but it was strange all the same. On Saturday afternoon we went to see Schindler's List."
What a weirdo.
Now that he is no longer anywhere near the running of anything, it is actually quite nice to know that Tony Blair is still as barking mad as ever. It is like knowing that Songs of Praise or Casualty is still on, even if you yourself would never watch it. Blair really, truly, honestly believes that Labour lost the 2010 Election because it was not sufficiently committed to privatisation, warmongering, and the persecution of the old and the sick. Bless.
What does Blair even know about winning elections? After the death of John Smith, those who seized control of the Labour Party erased the fact that the combined Labour and SDP votes had been larger than the Conservative vote both in 1983 and in 1987. Such people still deny outright that the opinion poll rating that was the 1997 result had not varied since Golden Wednesday, 16th September 1992. There were swings of 1997 proportions in the European Elections just after Smith's death, i.e., under the leadership of Margaret Beckett.
Among those of us who have been active in the Labour Party in County Durham, it is common knowledge that Blair had been about to announce his departure from Parliament at the General Election then expected to be called in 1996, but Smith's death changed his mind, at least conditional on his victory in the consequent Leadership Election. In 1992, only the most obsessive political anorak had ever even heard of Tony Blair. And that was still the case on Golden Wednesday, when the Conservative defeat, and thus the Labour "victory" by default, became a done deal. Only in 2005 did Blair finally influence a General Election result at all. Specifically, he lost Labour 100 seats that any other Labour Leader would have saved. Thus he moved from being a mere irrelevance to being a positive liability.
Meanwhile, yet another horrendous health figure for the North East. Not just in health, but across the board, those starry-eyed souls who want David Miliband "because he is a North East MP" need to ask what the hell the last North East MP to be Prime Minister ever did for us. We didn't get 1980s-style boarded up shop fronts when the banks went under. We never stopped having them, including throughout the Premiership of Tony Blair. When is anyone going to start talking about the proposals of Ed Balls on housing? Or of Andy Burnham on tax reform and on care in old age? Or of Diane Abbott on the railways, on civil liberties, and on peace? We live in hope that tonight's Channel Four News will provide such fare for people who are interested in politics, with BBC Two serving up Blair for people who are not.
Still, let him have the last word:
"Of course, I had no knowledge that John would die prematurely. Except that, in a strange way, I began to think he might... I said to (Cherie): 'If John dies, I will be leader, not Gordon. And somehow, I think this will happen. I just think it will.' Is that a premonition? Not in a strict sense; but it was strange all the same. On Saturday afternoon we went to see Schindler's List."
What a weirdo.
La Siempre Fidelísima Isla
"Cuba is the country to which I would move if I really did want a government that persecuted those who engaged in homosexual acts." I have written that many times, here and elsewhere. It really, really, really gets under certain people's skins. Well, now they can take the matter up with Fidel Castro himself.
Now that there is no longer an American Administration full of people who have never recanted their Trotskyism, President Obama should lift the entire blockade, which only attracts sympathy to this regime that does not deserve it, perhaps most notable as the model for Britain's impregnable pseudo-comprehensive schools by means of which the real, but vigorously self-denying, ruling class perpetuates itself from generation to generation.
He has already shown his indifference towards the Israel Lobby that so damages American (and Israeli) interests. So he should have no problem against the anti-American activities of vastly less numerous Cuban pretend-exiles, who are in fact economic migrants and free to go back any time they like, and who, far from being conservative, merely wish to restore the Cuba that existed before 1959, a giant drug den and brothel for the American super-rich.
Now that there is no longer an American Administration full of people who have never recanted their Trotskyism, President Obama should lift the entire blockade, which only attracts sympathy to this regime that does not deserve it, perhaps most notable as the model for Britain's impregnable pseudo-comprehensive schools by means of which the real, but vigorously self-denying, ruling class perpetuates itself from generation to generation.
He has already shown his indifference towards the Israel Lobby that so damages American (and Israeli) interests. So he should have no problem against the anti-American activities of vastly less numerous Cuban pretend-exiles, who are in fact economic migrants and free to go back any time they like, and who, far from being conservative, merely wish to restore the Cuba that existed before 1959, a giant drug den and brothel for the American super-rich.
The Srebrenica Genocide Myth
Srdja Trifkovic writes:
On July 11, the three constituent nations of Bosnia-Herzegovina marked the 15th anniversary of “Srebrenica.” The name of the eastern Bosnian town still evokes different responses from different communities, however. In the West, in the meantime, the complexities of the issue remain reduced to a simple morality play devoid of nuance and context.
That is exactly how the sponsors of the “Srebrenica Remembrance Day” -- submitted to the Canadian House of Commons last month -- want it to be:
Whereas the Srebrenica Massacre, also known as the Srebrenica Genocide, was the killing in July of 1995 of an estimated 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in the region of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina by Bosnian Serb forces;
Whereas the Srebrenica Massacre is the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II and the largest massacre carried out by Serb forces during the Bosnian war;
Whereas the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, located in The Hague, unanimously decided in the case of Prosecutor v. Krstić that the Srebrenica Massacre was genocide [...]
The trouble is that the event known to the bill’s sponsors as the “Srebernica genocide” was no such thing. The contention that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed has no basis in available evidence; it is not an “estimate” but a political construct. The magnitude of casualties at Srebrenica and the context of events have been routinely misrepresented in official reports by the pro-Muslim governments, quasi-non-governmental institutions, and the media.
As for The Hague Tribunal, an Orwellian institution with which I am well acquainted, its “unanimous decisions” are as drearily predictable as those in Moscow in 1936. It is not known to the public, however, that those “decisions” are now disputed by a host of senior Western military and civilian officials, NATO intelligence officers and independent intelligence analysts who dispute the official portrayal of the capture of Srebrenica as a unique atrocity in the Bosnian conflict.
The Facts -- During the Bosnian war between May 1992 and July 1995, several thousand Muslim men lost their lives in Srebrenica and its surroundings. Most of them died in July of 1995 when the enclave fell unexpectedly to the Bosnian Serb Army and the Muslim garrison attempted a breakthrough. Some escaped to the Muslim-held town of Tuzla, 38 miles to the north. Many were killed while fighting their way through; and many others were taken prisoner and executed by the Bosnian Serb army.
The exact numbers remain unknown, disputed, and misrepresented. With 8,000 executed and thousands killed in the fighting, there should have been huge gravesites and satellite evidence of both executions, burials, and any body removals. The UN searches in the Srebrenica vicinity, breathlessly frantic at times, produced two thousand bodies. They included those of soldiers killed in action -- both Muslim and Serb -- both before and during July 1995.
The Numbers Game -- In the documents of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague (ICTY) there is no conclusive breakdown of casualties. That a war crime did take place, that hundreds of Muslim prisoners were killed, is undeniable. The number of its victims remains forensically and demographically unverified, however. According to the former BBC reporter Jonathan Rooper, “from the outset the numbers were used and abused” for political purposes. Over the years it has been held to be highly significant that original ballpark estimates for the number who might have been massacred at Srebrenica corresponded closely to the ‘missing’ list of 7,300 compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Rooper says. But the early estimates were based on nothing more than the simple combination of an estimated 3,000 men last seen at the UN base at Potocari and an estimated 5,000 people reported ‘to have left the enclave before it fell’:
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the 7-8,000 figure is that it has always been represented as synonymous with the number of people executed. This was never a possibility: numerous contemporary accounts noted that UN and other independent observers had witnessed fierce fighting with significant casualties on both sides. It was also known that others had fled to Muslim-held territory around Tuzla and Zepa, that some had made their way westwards and northwards, and that some had fled into Serbia. It is therefore certain that nowhere near all the missing could have been executed.
The key problem of all is that the arithmetic does not add up. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported at the time that some 3,000 Bosnian Army soldiers managed to reach Muslim lines near Tuzla and were redeployed by the Bosnian Army “without their families being informed.” The number of military survivors was also confirmed by Muslim General Enver Hadzihasanovic in his testimony at The Hague.
The last census results for Srebrenica, from 1991, counted 37,211 inhabitants in Srebrenica and the surrounding villages, of which 27,118 were Muslims (72.8 percent) and 9,381 Serbs (25.2 percent). Displaced persons from Srebrenica registered with the World Health Organization and Bosnian government in early August 1995 totaled 35,632. With 3,000 Muslim men who reached Tuzla “without their families being informed” we come to the figure of over 38,000 survivors. The Hague Tribunal’s own estimates of the total population of the Srebrenica enclave before July 1995 -- notably that made by Judge Patricia Wald -- give 40,000 as the maximum figure. The numbers don't add up.
Furthermore, despite spending five days interviewing over 20,000 Srebrenica survivors at Tuzla a week after the fall of the enclave, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Henry Wieland declared, “we have not found anyone who saw with their own eyes an atrocity taking place.” A decade later Dr Dick Schoonoord of the Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdoumentatie (NIOD) confirmed Wieland’s verdict: “It has been impossible during our investigations in Bosnia to find any people who witnessed the mass murder or would talk about the fate of the missing men.”
A UN-Protected Jihadist Camp – It is often pointed out that Srebrenica was an UN “protected zone,” but it is seldom noted that the enclave was simultaneously an armed camp used for attacks against Serb villages in the surrounding areas. Muslim General Sefer Halilovic confirmed in his testimony at the Hague Tribunal that there were at least 5,500 Bosnian Army soldiers in Srebrenica after it had obtained the “safe haven” status, and that he had personally arranged numerous deliveries of sophisticated weapons by helicopter.
French General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR commander who first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave, is adamant that the crimes committed by those Muslim soldiers made the Serbs’ desire for revenge inevitable. He testified at The Hague Tribunal on February 12, 2004, that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region.”
Asked by the ICTY prosecutor how Oric treated his Serb prisoners, General Morillon, who knew him well, replied that “Naser Oric was a warlord who reigned by terror in his area and over the population itself”: “According to my recollection, he didn’t even look for an excuse. It was simply a statement: One can’t be bothered with prisoners.”
Professor Cees Wiebes, who wrote the intelligence section of the Dutch Government report on Srebrenica, notes that despite signing the demilitarization agreement, Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica were heavily armed and engaged in provocations (“sabotage operations”) against Serbian forces. Professor Wiebes, a senior lecturer in the Department of International Relations at Amsterdam University, caused a storm with his book Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, detailing the role of the Clinton administration in allowing Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims. Wiebes catalogues how, from 1992 to January 1996, there was an influx of Iranian weapons and advisers into Bosnia. By facilitating the illegal transfer of weapons to Bosnian Muslim forces and turning a blind eye toward the entry of foreign Mujahadeen fighters, the US turned supposed safe zones for civilians into staging areas for conflict and a tripwire for NATO intervention. Dr Wiebes notes that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency facilitated the transfer of illegal arms from Muslim countries to the Tuzla airport using Hercules C-130 transport planes. It arranged for gaps in air surveillance by AWACs, which were supposed to guard against such illegal arms traffic. Along with these weapons came Mujahadeen fighters from both Iranian training camps and al-Qaeda, including two of the hijackers involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Khaled Sheik Mohammed who helped plan the attack.
Cui bono? -- On 11 July, 1995, the Muslim garrison was ordered to evacuate the town which the Serbs entered unopposed. Local Deputy Director of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, wrote in 2004 (“Was Srebrenica a Hoax?”) that Muslim forces did not even try to take advantage of their heavy artillery because “military resistance would jeopardize the image of ‘victim,’ which had been so carefully constructed, and which the Muslims considered vital to maintain.”
Two prominent Muslim allies of the late Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, his Srebrenica party chairman Ibran Mustafic and police commander Hakija Meholjic, have subsequently accused Izetbegovic of deliberately sacrificing the enclave in order to trigger NATO intervention. Meholjic is explicit: in his presence, Izetbegovic quoted Bill Clinton as saying that 5,000 dead Muslims would be sufficient to provide the political basis for an American-led intervention on the side of the Muslims, which both of them wanted.
In their testimony before The Hague Tribunal, Bosnian Muslim Generals Halilovic and Hadzihasanovic confirmed that 18 top officers of the Srebrenica garrison were abruptly removed in May 1995. This was done even as the high command was ordering sabotage operations against Bosnian Serbs. One of these was a militarily meaningless attack on a strategically unimportant nearby Serb village of Visnica, which triggered off the Serb counter-attack which captured the undefended town. Ibran Mustafic, the former head of the Muslim SDA party in Srebrenica, is adamant that the scenario for the sacrifice of Srebrenica was carefully prepared:
Unfortunately, the Bosnian presidency and the Army command were involved in this business … Had I received orders to attack the Serb army from the demilitarized zone, I would have rejected to carry out that order. I would have asked the person who had issued that order to bring his family to Srebrenica, so that I can give him a gun let him stage attacks from the demilitarized zone. I knew that such shameful, calculated moves were leading my people to catastrophe. The order came from Sarajevo.
British military analyst Tim Ripley, who has written for Jane’s, agrees with the assessment that Srebrenica was deliberately sacrificed by the Muslim political leaders. He noted that Dutch UN soldiers “saw Bosnian troops escaping from Srebrenica past their observation points, carrying brand new anti-tank weapons [which] made many UN officers and international journalists suspicious.”
The G-Word -- The term “genocide” is even more contentious than the exact circumstances of Srebrenica’s fall. Local chief of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, noted that if there had been a premeditated plan of genocide,
instead of attacking in only one direction, from the south to the north -- which left the hypothesis to escape to the north and west, the Serbs would have established a siege in order to ensure that no one escaped. The UN observation posts to the north of the enclave were never disturbed and remained in activity after the end of the military operations. There are obviously mass graves in the outskirts of Srebrenica as in the rest of ex-Yugoslavia where combat has occurred, but there are no grounds for the campaign which was mounted, nor the numbers advanced by CNN. The mass graves are filled by a limited number of corpses from both sides, the consequence of heated battle and combat and not the result of a premeditated plan of genocide, as occurred against the Serbian populations in Krajina, in the Summer of 1995, when the Croatian army implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there.
The fact that The Hague Tribunal’s presiding judge, Theodor Meron, called the massacre in Srebrenica “genocide” does not make it so. What plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to eliminate Muslims, what about hundreds of thousands of Muslims living peacefully in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there from Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Žepa, who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days after capturing Srebrenica? To get around these common sense obstacles, the ICTY prosecution came up with a sociologist who provided an “expert” opinion: the Srebrenica Muslims lived in a patriarchal society, therefore killing the men was enough to ensure that there would be no more Muslims in Srebrenica. Such psychobabble turns the term “genocide” into a gruesome joke.
Yet it was on the basis of this definition that in August 2001, the Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of “complicity in genocide.” Even if the unproven figure of “8,000” is assumed, it affected less than one-half of one percent of Bosnia’s Muslim population in a locality covering one percent of its territory. On such form, the term “genocide” loses all meaning and becomes a propaganda tool rather than a legal and historical concept. On that form, America’s NATO ally Turkey -- a major regional player in today’s Balkans -- certainly committed genocide in northern Cyprus in 1974. On that form, no military conflict ever can be genocide-free.
Because of the manner in which international criminal law is currently formulated, the threshold of proof required to secure a conviction for genocide is actually lower than it is for crimes against humanity. To secure a conviction for crimes against humanity the ICTY prosecution must prove that the acts were “widespread or systematic.” No such condition applies for genocide. Moreover, as British analyst John Laughland points out, crimes against humanity can be committed only against civilians, whereas genocide -- as redefined in the case of Srebrenica -- can include the killing of military personnel as well. In other words, spontaneous or disparate acts involving the killing of military personnel can be classified as “genocide.” This creates ample room for propagandistic abuse of the term.
Srebrenica as a Postmodernist Totem -- Laughland contends that the myth of the “Srebrenica Genocide” is essential to a program of international interventionism, based on weak legal reasoning and disregard for due process, of which the Serbs happen to be the guinea-pigs. In his view, Srebrenica has been raised to the status it now enjoys because its fall represented a defeat not only for the Bosnian Muslims but also for the “international community” and its policy of global interventionism:
Srebrenica was important -- at least for the supporters of interventionism -- because the UN was there, not just because it was a Muslim enclave. The United Nations as an institution, it must be remembered, had embarked in the 1990s on an aggressive policy of military, political and judicial interventionism in both Iraq and Yugoslavia. It continued to apply the highly intrusive sanctions regime against Iraq throughout the decade and into the 21st century, and of course was happy to become the administrator of Kosovo after 1999. Its own credibility, and that of the states which dictated its policies, was destroyed when the enclave fell.
The activists of judicial and military supra-nationalism, Laughland points out, were therefore determined to make the genocide charge stick somewhere. “Genocide” offers them two key legal advantages in pursuit of the goal of creating a new international system no longer based on state sovereignty. The first is the low threshold of proof mentioned above. The second legal advantage of genocide -- from the point of view of the project of creating a system of supranational coercive criminal law -- is that genocide, unlike crimes against humanity, is the subject of a binding international treaty, the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The importance of the existence of a treaty, as opposed to the existence of a norm in mere “customary international law” -- i.e. whatever judges or even academics say they think the law is -- was illustrated with the landmark ruling in the British House of Lords against General Pinochet, issued on 24 March, 1999, (the day the bombs started raining down on Yugoslavia). Activists for universal jurisdiction ratione materiae were very excited by this ruling because it seemed to confirm that even heads of state could be put on trial when certain kinds of crimes were alleged against them. ... Srebrenica, then, is an existential issue, not as much for Republika Srpska as for those activists who seek to consolidate once and for all that outcome which the former ICTY Prosecutor, Louise Arbour, said she had achieved in 1999: ‘We have passed from an era of cooperation between states to an era in which states can be constrained.’
Dr. Diana Johnstone, an American expert on the Balkans, has summed up the Arbour mindset neatly in a seminal “Counterpunch” article:
The ‘Srebrenica massacre’ is part of a dominant culture discourse that goes like this: We people in the advanced democracies have reached a new moral plateau, from which we are both able and have a duty both to judge others and to impose our ‘values’ when necessary. The others, on a lower moral plateau, must be watched carefully, because unlike us, they may commit ‘genocide.’ It is remarkable how ‘genocide’ has become fashionable, with more and more ‘genocide experts’ in universities, as if studying genocide made sense as a separate academic discipline… The subliminal message in the official Srebrenica discourse is that because ‘we’ let that happen, ‘we’ mustn't let ‘it’ happen again, ergo, the United States should preventively bomb potential perpetrators of ‘genocide’.
But Why? -- Questioning the received elite class narrative on “Srebrenica” is a good and necessary endeavor. The accepted Srebrenica story, influenced by war propaganda and uncritical media reports, is neither historically correct nor morally satisfying. The relentless Western campaign against the Serbs and in favor of their Muslim foes -- which is what “Srebrenica” is really all about -- is detrimental to the survival of our culture and civilization. It seeks to give further credence to the myth of Muslim blameless victimhood, Serb viciousness, and Western indifference, and therefore weaken our resolve in the global struggle euphemistically known as “war on terrorism.” The former is a crime; the latter, a mistake.
The involvement of the Clinton administration in the wars of Yugoslav succession was a good example of the failed expectation that pandering to Muslim ambitions in a secondary theater will improve the U.S. standing in the Muslim world as a whole. The notion germinated in the final months of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, when his Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said that a goal in Bosnia was to mollify the Muslim world and to counter any perception of an anti-Muslim bias regarding American policies in Iraq in the period leading up to Gulf War I. The result of years of policies thus inspired is a terrorist base the heart of Europe, a moral debacle, and the absence of any positive payoff to the United States.
Former U.S. Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns declared on February 18, 2008, a day after Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence: “Kosovo is going to be a vastly majority Muslim state… and we think it is a very positive step that this Muslim state, Muslim majority state, has been created today.” If it is intrinsically “a very positive step” that a “vastly Muslim state” is created on European soil that had been cleansed of non-Muslims, it is only a matter of time before similar blessings are bestowed on Americans.
If Western and especially U.S. policy in the Balkans was not meant to facilitate Jihad, the issue is not why, but how its effects paradoxically coincided with the regional objectives of those same Islamists who confront America in other parts of the world. “Srebrenica” provides some of the answers. The immediate bill is being paid by the people of the Balkans, but “Srebrenica’s” long-term costs will come to haunt the West for decades to come.
On July 11, the three constituent nations of Bosnia-Herzegovina marked the 15th anniversary of “Srebrenica.” The name of the eastern Bosnian town still evokes different responses from different communities, however. In the West, in the meantime, the complexities of the issue remain reduced to a simple morality play devoid of nuance and context.
That is exactly how the sponsors of the “Srebrenica Remembrance Day” -- submitted to the Canadian House of Commons last month -- want it to be:
Whereas the Srebrenica Massacre, also known as the Srebrenica Genocide, was the killing in July of 1995 of an estimated 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in the region of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina by Bosnian Serb forces;
Whereas the Srebrenica Massacre is the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II and the largest massacre carried out by Serb forces during the Bosnian war;
Whereas the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, located in The Hague, unanimously decided in the case of Prosecutor v. Krstić that the Srebrenica Massacre was genocide [...]
The trouble is that the event known to the bill’s sponsors as the “Srebernica genocide” was no such thing. The contention that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed has no basis in available evidence; it is not an “estimate” but a political construct. The magnitude of casualties at Srebrenica and the context of events have been routinely misrepresented in official reports by the pro-Muslim governments, quasi-non-governmental institutions, and the media.
As for The Hague Tribunal, an Orwellian institution with which I am well acquainted, its “unanimous decisions” are as drearily predictable as those in Moscow in 1936. It is not known to the public, however, that those “decisions” are now disputed by a host of senior Western military and civilian officials, NATO intelligence officers and independent intelligence analysts who dispute the official portrayal of the capture of Srebrenica as a unique atrocity in the Bosnian conflict.
The Facts -- During the Bosnian war between May 1992 and July 1995, several thousand Muslim men lost their lives in Srebrenica and its surroundings. Most of them died in July of 1995 when the enclave fell unexpectedly to the Bosnian Serb Army and the Muslim garrison attempted a breakthrough. Some escaped to the Muslim-held town of Tuzla, 38 miles to the north. Many were killed while fighting their way through; and many others were taken prisoner and executed by the Bosnian Serb army.
The exact numbers remain unknown, disputed, and misrepresented. With 8,000 executed and thousands killed in the fighting, there should have been huge gravesites and satellite evidence of both executions, burials, and any body removals. The UN searches in the Srebrenica vicinity, breathlessly frantic at times, produced two thousand bodies. They included those of soldiers killed in action -- both Muslim and Serb -- both before and during July 1995.
The Numbers Game -- In the documents of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague (ICTY) there is no conclusive breakdown of casualties. That a war crime did take place, that hundreds of Muslim prisoners were killed, is undeniable. The number of its victims remains forensically and demographically unverified, however. According to the former BBC reporter Jonathan Rooper, “from the outset the numbers were used and abused” for political purposes. Over the years it has been held to be highly significant that original ballpark estimates for the number who might have been massacred at Srebrenica corresponded closely to the ‘missing’ list of 7,300 compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Rooper says. But the early estimates were based on nothing more than the simple combination of an estimated 3,000 men last seen at the UN base at Potocari and an estimated 5,000 people reported ‘to have left the enclave before it fell’:
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the 7-8,000 figure is that it has always been represented as synonymous with the number of people executed. This was never a possibility: numerous contemporary accounts noted that UN and other independent observers had witnessed fierce fighting with significant casualties on both sides. It was also known that others had fled to Muslim-held territory around Tuzla and Zepa, that some had made their way westwards and northwards, and that some had fled into Serbia. It is therefore certain that nowhere near all the missing could have been executed.
The key problem of all is that the arithmetic does not add up. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported at the time that some 3,000 Bosnian Army soldiers managed to reach Muslim lines near Tuzla and were redeployed by the Bosnian Army “without their families being informed.” The number of military survivors was also confirmed by Muslim General Enver Hadzihasanovic in his testimony at The Hague.
The last census results for Srebrenica, from 1991, counted 37,211 inhabitants in Srebrenica and the surrounding villages, of which 27,118 were Muslims (72.8 percent) and 9,381 Serbs (25.2 percent). Displaced persons from Srebrenica registered with the World Health Organization and Bosnian government in early August 1995 totaled 35,632. With 3,000 Muslim men who reached Tuzla “without their families being informed” we come to the figure of over 38,000 survivors. The Hague Tribunal’s own estimates of the total population of the Srebrenica enclave before July 1995 -- notably that made by Judge Patricia Wald -- give 40,000 as the maximum figure. The numbers don't add up.
Furthermore, despite spending five days interviewing over 20,000 Srebrenica survivors at Tuzla a week after the fall of the enclave, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Henry Wieland declared, “we have not found anyone who saw with their own eyes an atrocity taking place.” A decade later Dr Dick Schoonoord of the Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdoumentatie (NIOD) confirmed Wieland’s verdict: “It has been impossible during our investigations in Bosnia to find any people who witnessed the mass murder or would talk about the fate of the missing men.”
A UN-Protected Jihadist Camp – It is often pointed out that Srebrenica was an UN “protected zone,” but it is seldom noted that the enclave was simultaneously an armed camp used for attacks against Serb villages in the surrounding areas. Muslim General Sefer Halilovic confirmed in his testimony at the Hague Tribunal that there were at least 5,500 Bosnian Army soldiers in Srebrenica after it had obtained the “safe haven” status, and that he had personally arranged numerous deliveries of sophisticated weapons by helicopter.
French General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR commander who first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave, is adamant that the crimes committed by those Muslim soldiers made the Serbs’ desire for revenge inevitable. He testified at The Hague Tribunal on February 12, 2004, that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region.”
Asked by the ICTY prosecutor how Oric treated his Serb prisoners, General Morillon, who knew him well, replied that “Naser Oric was a warlord who reigned by terror in his area and over the population itself”: “According to my recollection, he didn’t even look for an excuse. It was simply a statement: One can’t be bothered with prisoners.”
Professor Cees Wiebes, who wrote the intelligence section of the Dutch Government report on Srebrenica, notes that despite signing the demilitarization agreement, Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica were heavily armed and engaged in provocations (“sabotage operations”) against Serbian forces. Professor Wiebes, a senior lecturer in the Department of International Relations at Amsterdam University, caused a storm with his book Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, detailing the role of the Clinton administration in allowing Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims. Wiebes catalogues how, from 1992 to January 1996, there was an influx of Iranian weapons and advisers into Bosnia. By facilitating the illegal transfer of weapons to Bosnian Muslim forces and turning a blind eye toward the entry of foreign Mujahadeen fighters, the US turned supposed safe zones for civilians into staging areas for conflict and a tripwire for NATO intervention. Dr Wiebes notes that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency facilitated the transfer of illegal arms from Muslim countries to the Tuzla airport using Hercules C-130 transport planes. It arranged for gaps in air surveillance by AWACs, which were supposed to guard against such illegal arms traffic. Along with these weapons came Mujahadeen fighters from both Iranian training camps and al-Qaeda, including two of the hijackers involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Khaled Sheik Mohammed who helped plan the attack.
Cui bono? -- On 11 July, 1995, the Muslim garrison was ordered to evacuate the town which the Serbs entered unopposed. Local Deputy Director of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, wrote in 2004 (“Was Srebrenica a Hoax?”) that Muslim forces did not even try to take advantage of their heavy artillery because “military resistance would jeopardize the image of ‘victim,’ which had been so carefully constructed, and which the Muslims considered vital to maintain.”
Two prominent Muslim allies of the late Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, his Srebrenica party chairman Ibran Mustafic and police commander Hakija Meholjic, have subsequently accused Izetbegovic of deliberately sacrificing the enclave in order to trigger NATO intervention. Meholjic is explicit: in his presence, Izetbegovic quoted Bill Clinton as saying that 5,000 dead Muslims would be sufficient to provide the political basis for an American-led intervention on the side of the Muslims, which both of them wanted.
In their testimony before The Hague Tribunal, Bosnian Muslim Generals Halilovic and Hadzihasanovic confirmed that 18 top officers of the Srebrenica garrison were abruptly removed in May 1995. This was done even as the high command was ordering sabotage operations against Bosnian Serbs. One of these was a militarily meaningless attack on a strategically unimportant nearby Serb village of Visnica, which triggered off the Serb counter-attack which captured the undefended town. Ibran Mustafic, the former head of the Muslim SDA party in Srebrenica, is adamant that the scenario for the sacrifice of Srebrenica was carefully prepared:
Unfortunately, the Bosnian presidency and the Army command were involved in this business … Had I received orders to attack the Serb army from the demilitarized zone, I would have rejected to carry out that order. I would have asked the person who had issued that order to bring his family to Srebrenica, so that I can give him a gun let him stage attacks from the demilitarized zone. I knew that such shameful, calculated moves were leading my people to catastrophe. The order came from Sarajevo.
British military analyst Tim Ripley, who has written for Jane’s, agrees with the assessment that Srebrenica was deliberately sacrificed by the Muslim political leaders. He noted that Dutch UN soldiers “saw Bosnian troops escaping from Srebrenica past their observation points, carrying brand new anti-tank weapons [which] made many UN officers and international journalists suspicious.”
The G-Word -- The term “genocide” is even more contentious than the exact circumstances of Srebrenica’s fall. Local chief of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, noted that if there had been a premeditated plan of genocide,
instead of attacking in only one direction, from the south to the north -- which left the hypothesis to escape to the north and west, the Serbs would have established a siege in order to ensure that no one escaped. The UN observation posts to the north of the enclave were never disturbed and remained in activity after the end of the military operations. There are obviously mass graves in the outskirts of Srebrenica as in the rest of ex-Yugoslavia where combat has occurred, but there are no grounds for the campaign which was mounted, nor the numbers advanced by CNN. The mass graves are filled by a limited number of corpses from both sides, the consequence of heated battle and combat and not the result of a premeditated plan of genocide, as occurred against the Serbian populations in Krajina, in the Summer of 1995, when the Croatian army implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there.
The fact that The Hague Tribunal’s presiding judge, Theodor Meron, called the massacre in Srebrenica “genocide” does not make it so. What plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to eliminate Muslims, what about hundreds of thousands of Muslims living peacefully in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there from Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Žepa, who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days after capturing Srebrenica? To get around these common sense obstacles, the ICTY prosecution came up with a sociologist who provided an “expert” opinion: the Srebrenica Muslims lived in a patriarchal society, therefore killing the men was enough to ensure that there would be no more Muslims in Srebrenica. Such psychobabble turns the term “genocide” into a gruesome joke.
Yet it was on the basis of this definition that in August 2001, the Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of “complicity in genocide.” Even if the unproven figure of “8,000” is assumed, it affected less than one-half of one percent of Bosnia’s Muslim population in a locality covering one percent of its territory. On such form, the term “genocide” loses all meaning and becomes a propaganda tool rather than a legal and historical concept. On that form, America’s NATO ally Turkey -- a major regional player in today’s Balkans -- certainly committed genocide in northern Cyprus in 1974. On that form, no military conflict ever can be genocide-free.
Because of the manner in which international criminal law is currently formulated, the threshold of proof required to secure a conviction for genocide is actually lower than it is for crimes against humanity. To secure a conviction for crimes against humanity the ICTY prosecution must prove that the acts were “widespread or systematic.” No such condition applies for genocide. Moreover, as British analyst John Laughland points out, crimes against humanity can be committed only against civilians, whereas genocide -- as redefined in the case of Srebrenica -- can include the killing of military personnel as well. In other words, spontaneous or disparate acts involving the killing of military personnel can be classified as “genocide.” This creates ample room for propagandistic abuse of the term.
Srebrenica as a Postmodernist Totem -- Laughland contends that the myth of the “Srebrenica Genocide” is essential to a program of international interventionism, based on weak legal reasoning and disregard for due process, of which the Serbs happen to be the guinea-pigs. In his view, Srebrenica has been raised to the status it now enjoys because its fall represented a defeat not only for the Bosnian Muslims but also for the “international community” and its policy of global interventionism:
Srebrenica was important -- at least for the supporters of interventionism -- because the UN was there, not just because it was a Muslim enclave. The United Nations as an institution, it must be remembered, had embarked in the 1990s on an aggressive policy of military, political and judicial interventionism in both Iraq and Yugoslavia. It continued to apply the highly intrusive sanctions regime against Iraq throughout the decade and into the 21st century, and of course was happy to become the administrator of Kosovo after 1999. Its own credibility, and that of the states which dictated its policies, was destroyed when the enclave fell.
The activists of judicial and military supra-nationalism, Laughland points out, were therefore determined to make the genocide charge stick somewhere. “Genocide” offers them two key legal advantages in pursuit of the goal of creating a new international system no longer based on state sovereignty. The first is the low threshold of proof mentioned above. The second legal advantage of genocide -- from the point of view of the project of creating a system of supranational coercive criminal law -- is that genocide, unlike crimes against humanity, is the subject of a binding international treaty, the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The importance of the existence of a treaty, as opposed to the existence of a norm in mere “customary international law” -- i.e. whatever judges or even academics say they think the law is -- was illustrated with the landmark ruling in the British House of Lords against General Pinochet, issued on 24 March, 1999, (the day the bombs started raining down on Yugoslavia). Activists for universal jurisdiction ratione materiae were very excited by this ruling because it seemed to confirm that even heads of state could be put on trial when certain kinds of crimes were alleged against them. ... Srebrenica, then, is an existential issue, not as much for Republika Srpska as for those activists who seek to consolidate once and for all that outcome which the former ICTY Prosecutor, Louise Arbour, said she had achieved in 1999: ‘We have passed from an era of cooperation between states to an era in which states can be constrained.’
Dr. Diana Johnstone, an American expert on the Balkans, has summed up the Arbour mindset neatly in a seminal “Counterpunch” article:
The ‘Srebrenica massacre’ is part of a dominant culture discourse that goes like this: We people in the advanced democracies have reached a new moral plateau, from which we are both able and have a duty both to judge others and to impose our ‘values’ when necessary. The others, on a lower moral plateau, must be watched carefully, because unlike us, they may commit ‘genocide.’ It is remarkable how ‘genocide’ has become fashionable, with more and more ‘genocide experts’ in universities, as if studying genocide made sense as a separate academic discipline… The subliminal message in the official Srebrenica discourse is that because ‘we’ let that happen, ‘we’ mustn't let ‘it’ happen again, ergo, the United States should preventively bomb potential perpetrators of ‘genocide’.
But Why? -- Questioning the received elite class narrative on “Srebrenica” is a good and necessary endeavor. The accepted Srebrenica story, influenced by war propaganda and uncritical media reports, is neither historically correct nor morally satisfying. The relentless Western campaign against the Serbs and in favor of their Muslim foes -- which is what “Srebrenica” is really all about -- is detrimental to the survival of our culture and civilization. It seeks to give further credence to the myth of Muslim blameless victimhood, Serb viciousness, and Western indifference, and therefore weaken our resolve in the global struggle euphemistically known as “war on terrorism.” The former is a crime; the latter, a mistake.
The involvement of the Clinton administration in the wars of Yugoslav succession was a good example of the failed expectation that pandering to Muslim ambitions in a secondary theater will improve the U.S. standing in the Muslim world as a whole. The notion germinated in the final months of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, when his Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said that a goal in Bosnia was to mollify the Muslim world and to counter any perception of an anti-Muslim bias regarding American policies in Iraq in the period leading up to Gulf War I. The result of years of policies thus inspired is a terrorist base the heart of Europe, a moral debacle, and the absence of any positive payoff to the United States.
Former U.S. Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns declared on February 18, 2008, a day after Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence: “Kosovo is going to be a vastly majority Muslim state… and we think it is a very positive step that this Muslim state, Muslim majority state, has been created today.” If it is intrinsically “a very positive step” that a “vastly Muslim state” is created on European soil that had been cleansed of non-Muslims, it is only a matter of time before similar blessings are bestowed on Americans.
If Western and especially U.S. policy in the Balkans was not meant to facilitate Jihad, the issue is not why, but how its effects paradoxically coincided with the regional objectives of those same Islamists who confront America in other parts of the world. “Srebrenica” provides some of the answers. The immediate bill is being paid by the people of the Balkans, but “Srebrenica’s” long-term costs will come to haunt the West for decades to come.
God, The Gospel, And Glenn Beck
Russell D. Moore writes:
A Mormon television star stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and calls American Christians to revival. He assembles some evangelical celebrities to give testimonies, and then preaches a God and country revivalism that leaves the evangelicals cheering that they’ve heard the gospel, right there in the nation’s capital.
The news media pronounces him the new leader of America’s Christian conservative movement, and a flock of America’s Christian conservatives have no problem with that.
If you’d told me that ten years ago, I would have assumed it was from the pages of an evangelical apocalyptic novel about the end-times. But it’s not. It’s from this week’s headlines. And it is a scandal.
Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, of course, is that Mormon at the center of all this. Beck isn’t the problem. He’s an entrepreneur, he’s brilliant, and, hats off to him, he knows his market. Latter-day Saints have every right to speak, with full religious liberty, in the public square. I’m quite willing to work with Mormons on various issues, as citizens working for the common good. What concerns me here is not what this says about Beck or the “Tea Party” or any other entertainment or political figure. What concerns me is about what this says about the Christian churches in the United States.
It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck. In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.
Rather than cultivating a Christian vision of justice and the common good (which would have, by necessity, been nuanced enough to put us sometimes at odds with our political allies), we’ve relied on populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads. We’ve tolerated heresy and buffoonery in our leadership as long as with it there is sufficient political “conservatism” and a sufficient commercial venue to sell our books and products.
Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.
Leaders will always be tempted to bypass the problem behind the problems: captivity to sin, bondage to the accusations of the demonic powers, the sentence of death. That’s why so many of our Christian superstars smile at crowds of thousands, reassuring them that they don’t like to talk about sin. That’s why other Christian celebrities are seen to be courageous for fighting their culture wars, while they carefully leave out the sins most likely to be endemic to the people paying the bills in their movements.
Where there is no gospel, something else will fill the void: therapy, consumerism, racial or class resentment, utopian politics, crazy conspiracy theories of the left, crazy conspiracy theories of the right; anything will do. The prophet Isaiah warned us of such conspiracies replacing the Word of God centuries ago (Is. 8:12–20). As long as the Serpent’s voice is heard, “You shall not surely die,” the powers are comfortable.
This is, of course, not new. Our Lord Jesus faced this test when Satan took him to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth, and their glory. Satan did not mind surrendering his authority to Jesus. He didn’t mind a universe without pornography or Islam or abortion or nuclear weaponry. Satan did not mind Judeo-Christian values. He wasn’t worried about “revival” or “getting back to God.” What he opposes was the gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected for the sins of the world.
We used to sing that old gospel song, “I will cling to an old rugged cross, and exchange it some day for a crown.” The scandalous scene at the Lincoln Memorial indicates that many of us want to exchange it in too soon. To Jesus, Satan offered power and glory. To us, all he needs offer is celebrity and attention.
Mormonism and Mammonism are contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. They offer another Lord Jesus than the One offered in the Scriptures and Christian tradition, and another way to approach him. An embrace of these tragic new vehicles for the old Gnostic heresy is unloving to our Mormon friends and secularist neighbors, and to the rest of the watching world. Any “revival” that is possible without the Lord Jesus Christ is a “revival” of a different kind of spirit than the Spirit of Christ (1 Jn. 4:1-3).
The answer to this scandal isn’t a retreat, as some would have it, to an allegedly apolitical isolation. Such attempts lead us right back here, in spades, to a hyper-political wasteland. If the churches are not forming consciences, consciences will be formed by the status quo, including whatever demagogues can yell the loudest or cry the hardest. The answer isn’t a narrowing sectarianism, retreating further and further into our enclaves. The answer includes local churches that preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, and disciple their congregations to know the difference between the kingdom of God and the latest political whim.
It’s sad to see so many Christians confusing Mormon politics or American nationalism with the gospel of Jesus Christ. But, don’t get me wrong, I’m not pessimistic. Jesus will build his church, and he will build it on the gospel. He doesn’t need American Christianity to do it. Vibrant, loving, orthodox Christianity will flourish, perhaps among the poor of Haiti or the persecuted of Sudan or the outlawed of China, but it will flourish.
And there will be a new generation, in America and elsewhere, who will be ready for a gospel that is more than just Fox News at prayer.
A Mormon television star stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and calls American Christians to revival. He assembles some evangelical celebrities to give testimonies, and then preaches a God and country revivalism that leaves the evangelicals cheering that they’ve heard the gospel, right there in the nation’s capital.
The news media pronounces him the new leader of America’s Christian conservative movement, and a flock of America’s Christian conservatives have no problem with that.
If you’d told me that ten years ago, I would have assumed it was from the pages of an evangelical apocalyptic novel about the end-times. But it’s not. It’s from this week’s headlines. And it is a scandal.
Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, of course, is that Mormon at the center of all this. Beck isn’t the problem. He’s an entrepreneur, he’s brilliant, and, hats off to him, he knows his market. Latter-day Saints have every right to speak, with full religious liberty, in the public square. I’m quite willing to work with Mormons on various issues, as citizens working for the common good. What concerns me here is not what this says about Beck or the “Tea Party” or any other entertainment or political figure. What concerns me is about what this says about the Christian churches in the United States.
It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck. In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.
Rather than cultivating a Christian vision of justice and the common good (which would have, by necessity, been nuanced enough to put us sometimes at odds with our political allies), we’ve relied on populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads. We’ve tolerated heresy and buffoonery in our leadership as long as with it there is sufficient political “conservatism” and a sufficient commercial venue to sell our books and products.
Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.
Leaders will always be tempted to bypass the problem behind the problems: captivity to sin, bondage to the accusations of the demonic powers, the sentence of death. That’s why so many of our Christian superstars smile at crowds of thousands, reassuring them that they don’t like to talk about sin. That’s why other Christian celebrities are seen to be courageous for fighting their culture wars, while they carefully leave out the sins most likely to be endemic to the people paying the bills in their movements.
Where there is no gospel, something else will fill the void: therapy, consumerism, racial or class resentment, utopian politics, crazy conspiracy theories of the left, crazy conspiracy theories of the right; anything will do. The prophet Isaiah warned us of such conspiracies replacing the Word of God centuries ago (Is. 8:12–20). As long as the Serpent’s voice is heard, “You shall not surely die,” the powers are comfortable.
This is, of course, not new. Our Lord Jesus faced this test when Satan took him to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth, and their glory. Satan did not mind surrendering his authority to Jesus. He didn’t mind a universe without pornography or Islam or abortion or nuclear weaponry. Satan did not mind Judeo-Christian values. He wasn’t worried about “revival” or “getting back to God.” What he opposes was the gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected for the sins of the world.
We used to sing that old gospel song, “I will cling to an old rugged cross, and exchange it some day for a crown.” The scandalous scene at the Lincoln Memorial indicates that many of us want to exchange it in too soon. To Jesus, Satan offered power and glory. To us, all he needs offer is celebrity and attention.
Mormonism and Mammonism are contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. They offer another Lord Jesus than the One offered in the Scriptures and Christian tradition, and another way to approach him. An embrace of these tragic new vehicles for the old Gnostic heresy is unloving to our Mormon friends and secularist neighbors, and to the rest of the watching world. Any “revival” that is possible without the Lord Jesus Christ is a “revival” of a different kind of spirit than the Spirit of Christ (1 Jn. 4:1-3).
The answer to this scandal isn’t a retreat, as some would have it, to an allegedly apolitical isolation. Such attempts lead us right back here, in spades, to a hyper-political wasteland. If the churches are not forming consciences, consciences will be formed by the status quo, including whatever demagogues can yell the loudest or cry the hardest. The answer isn’t a narrowing sectarianism, retreating further and further into our enclaves. The answer includes local churches that preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, and disciple their congregations to know the difference between the kingdom of God and the latest political whim.
It’s sad to see so many Christians confusing Mormon politics or American nationalism with the gospel of Jesus Christ. But, don’t get me wrong, I’m not pessimistic. Jesus will build his church, and he will build it on the gospel. He doesn’t need American Christianity to do it. Vibrant, loving, orthodox Christianity will flourish, perhaps among the poor of Haiti or the persecuted of Sudan or the outlawed of China, but it will flourish.
And there will be a new generation, in America and elsewhere, who will be ready for a gospel that is more than just Fox News at prayer.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
