Yesterday we celebrated the 75th anniversary of the fall of Rome, and at 0630 British Double Summer Time tomorrow the liberation of France started, also 75 years ago. Thus setting up a pincers attack on Nazi Germany. This was the climax of the European war, not the end of the beginning but the beginning of the end.
Like most of those of my age, I knew many of the veterans of those campaigns (the ones in the Pacific as well). Almost all of them are gone now, and we are much poorer for it.
If memory serves, Chalcedon’s father was at Dunkirk and served throughout the war. But C, like most of our generation, especially the guys, don’t talk about our emotions.
But Jess’s Grandfather in law, featured on our blogs briefly, when he left us back in 2012, and what she wrote, tells much of that generation.
Tom was not a Christian, although his wife (of 60 years) was; but he was a good man, although not given to what he used to call “sentiment”. The only time I ever saw him cry was when his wife died. She was the sweetest Christian soul I have ever known – a gentle and caring lady of the old school, who soothed away the ruffled tempers Tom’s attitude could leave in its wake. I never knew anyone who did not love her; I can’t even imagine how anyone could not.
Her death left him bereft. From that point his mental condition deteriorated, and for most of the last two years he had to be in a home because he had lost his faculties. I used to visit him every month, as the Captain was not here (as he isn’t now). He was a gruff old thing, and got gruffer as his condition worsened. But the last couple of times I saw him he just held my hand and smiled; and it was me who cried.
I cried for a man who had lost what he loved most. Like most of those of that generation, he and his wife seldom, if ever, demonstrated their love. They called each other “mother” and “father” and were just about the sweetest couple I ever saw in their selfless devotion to each other. I once said that and Tom replied: “Don’t be so daft girl – mother wouldn’t like it!” ‘Mother’ said to me later: “I liked that Jessica, but don’t ever tell father I told you so.” That’s how they were. They don’t make them like that any more.
She died just short of their sixtieth wedding anniversary. With Tom goes my last living link to the World War II generation; my last contact with a man born in the reign of George V; my last link with my own father’s generation. It is the passing of an era – Tom – I loved you more than you’d ever let me say – and I will miss you always – God Bless and good night old soldier.
She told me a bit more in Email, enough to intrigue me enough to do a bit of research. Here is what I learned.
Tom served in the 7th Armoured Brigade, the Desert Rats (the Green Rats) throughout World War 2, that means he was at all the battles of the British forces in North Africa until at least the relief of Tobruk. He may well have been one of those young soldiers, both British and German, who sang this song in Tobruk. [see below]
In early 1942 the brigade moved to that stepchild of everybody’s war effort, Burma just in time to have a hand in the defense of India from the Japanese.
In 1943 they returned to the middle east being based in Iraq and Egypt until in 1944 they joined the Canadian Corps in Italy, for the duration of the war.
Thus Tom, Like C’s father, likely spent more time in combat than the time America was in the war. Neither one was anything special, not even an officer, but it was they, and their American, Russian, Australian, New Zealander, Polish, French, Brazilian, and still other compatriates who rid the world of the most monstrous empires seen to this point.
And how far they had to go, in 1941, if English was not your native language, you were not a free man or woman Our world is their legacy.
And so today and tomorrow as we, all over the world, honor those men and women, whom we call “The Greatest Generation” led by the very last veteran still leading, the Queen herself it’s worth reflecting on what we have contributed to our legacy.
And you know, Tom, in his turn with the German soldiery, probably sat in the bars in Tobruk singing this song.
On the night of June 4th, General Eisenhower said these words, “OK, let’s go”. The rest is history written by the soldiers.
Many here are aware that the basis of western civilization is in our Judeo-Christian heritage. Often we merely assert this, since we have known it all our lives, but it can be examined fruitfully.
I admire Melanie Phillips greatly because not only is she a very good writer and speaker, she is fully capable of thinking through things. And she does so here. Yes, this is a long read, but I think you’ll find it valuable to read the whole thing.
It has become the orthodoxy in the West that freedom, human rights and reason all derive from secularism and that the greatest threat to all these good things is religion.
I want to suggest that the opposite is true. In the service of this orthodoxy, the West is undermining and destroying the very values which it holds most dear as the defining characteristics of a civilised society.
In truth, in the United States, we don’t hear it explicitly very often, but in Britain, it is quite common in my experience. Not to mention very strident, not only from the secularists, but from Randians, and other assorted libertine groups.
Some of this hostility is being driven by the perceived threat from Islamic terrorism and the Islamisation of Western culture. However, this animus against religion has far deeper roots and can be traced back to what is considered the birthplace of Western reason, the 18th-century Enlightenment.
Actually, it goes back specifically to the French Enlightenment. In England and Scotland, the Enlightenment developed reason and political liberty within the framework of Biblical belief. In France, by contrast, anti-clericalism morphed into fundamental hostility to Christianity and to religion itself.
“Ecrasez l’infame,” said Voltaire (crush infamy) — the infamy to which he referred being not just the Church but Christianity, which he wanted to replace with the religion of reason, virtue and liberty, “drawn from the bosom of nature”.
[…] Instead of God producing heaven on earth, it would be mankind which would bring that about. Reason would create the perfect society and “progress” was the process by which utopia would be attained.
Far from utopia, however, this thinking resulted in something more akin to hell on earth. For the worship of man through reason led straight to totalitarianism. It was reason that would redeem religious superstition and bring about the kingdom of Man on earth. And just like medieval apocalyptic Christian belief, this secular doctrine would also be unchallengeable and heretics would be punished. This kind of fanaticism infused the three great tyrannical movements that were spun out of Enlightenment thinking: the French Revolution, Communism and Fascism. […]
In the Sixties, the baby-boomer generation bought heavily into the idea propounded by Herbert Marcuse and other Marxist radicals that the way to transform the West lay not through the seizure of political or economic control but through the transformation of the culture. This has been achieved over the past half century through what has been called a “long march through the institutions”, the infiltration into all the institutions of the culture — the universities, media, professions, politics, civil service, churches — of ideas that would then become the orthodoxy.
From multiculturalism to environmentalism, from post-nationalism to “human rights” doctrine, Western progressives have fixated upon universalising ideas which reject values anchored in the particulars of religion or culture. All that matters is a theoretical future in which war, want and prejudice will be abolished: the return of fallen humanity to a lost Eden. And like all utopian projects, which are by definition impossible and unattainable, these dogmas are enforced through coercion: bullying, intimidation, character assassination, professional and social exclusion.
The core doctrine is equality. Not the Biblical doctrine that every human being is owed equal respect because they are formed in the image of God: equality has been redefined as identicality, the insistence that there can be no hierarchy of values of lifestyles or cultures. There can no longer be different outcomes depending on different circumstances or how people behave. To differentiate at all is to be bigoted and on a fast track back to fascism and war.
So the married family was kicked off its perch. Sexual restraint was abolished. The formerly transgressive became normative. Education could no longer transmit a culture down through the generations but had to teach that the Western nation was innately racist and exploitative.
Subjective trumped objective. There was no longer any absolute truth. Everyone could arbitrate their own truth. That way bigotry and prejudice would be excised from the human heart, the oppressed of the developing world would be freed from their Western oppressors and instead of the Western nation there would be the brotherhood of man.
All this was done in name of freedom, reason and enlightenment and in opposition to religion, the supposed source of oppression, irrationality and obscurantism.
At the heart of it was an onslaught against the moral codes of Christianity. Those moral codes are actually the Mosaic laws of the Hebrew Bible.
[…] What they [Western “progressives” and the Islamists] also have in common is hostility to Judaism, Israel or the Jewish people. The genocidal hatred of Israel and the Jews that drives the Islamic jihad against the West is not acknowledged or countered by the West because its most high-minded citizens share at least some of that prejudice. Both Western liberals and Islamists believe in utopias to which the Jews are an obstacle. The State of Israel is an obstacle to both the rule of Islam over the earth and a world where there are no divisions based on religion or creed. The Jews are an obstacle to the unconstrained individualism of Western libertines and to the onslaught against individual human dignity and freedom by the Islamists. Both the liberal utopias of a world without prejudice, divisions or war and the Islamist utopia of a world without unbelievers are universalist ideologies. The people who are always in the way of universalising utopias are the Jews.
Do read it all, and there is a deal more than I have given you. The full title is: Secularism and religion: the onslaught against the West’s moral codes. It is simply a superb examination of where our basic morality came from, and how it has allowed us to exceed former civilizations by orders of magnitude, and how it has come to be endangered.
Yesterday, I wrote at NEO about the terrorist attack in London. If you read me, you will know that I am becoming increasingly frustrated by Europe’s (including the UK in this instance) complete unwillingness to face the truth. 90% + of all terrorists are some variant of Islamic, even if only in their mind. We do our citizenry a major disservice when we fail to acknowledge that, and act to secure the rule of law. In my article, I quoted the great Russian writer Alexander Solzenitsyn’s famous commencement address at Harvard in 1978.
It struck a chord with me, and it did my astute readers as well. They dug around in my archives and found what I half-remembered. We had spoken of that address before, in a post of Jessica’s from 2013 while I was off for Christmas. It was an amazing post then, and it still is, and so I’ll share it with you today. Here’s Jessica, in one of her best.
The Exhausted West?
The title is not mine and it is not new. It was the title used by one of the last century’s greatest writers and spirits, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for his 1978 Commencement speech at Harvard. This came as a shock to the West at the time. Here was a man whom it had lauded as a hero of the Cold War, a moral giant who had exposed and condemned the Stalinist regime and its successors; in the face of his writing, the Left which liked to appease Communism fell silent, and the Right which loved to excoriate it celebrated him. But after his Harvard speech, his admirers were puzzled. Instead of thanking them and saying how wonderful the West was, Solzhenitsyn could not have made it clearer that he did not think that the best alternative to Communism was individualistic, humanistic capitalism. Any system which saw man as instrumental in a materialistic sense missed the point of human life: we are not here to be parts of the economic utopia or to consume, we are not an economic animal whose main point is to accumulate as much wealth as we can, or to consume as much as we can; there is nothing wrong with creating wealth, or even accumulating it – unless it is an end in itself. After all, the Good Samaritan could not (as Lady Thatcher once reminded us) have done any good had he not had the money with which to do it. Jesus did not condemn wealth, he feared its effects on the rich man, and he wanted it, like all of God’s good things, to be used rightly. A society which pursued wealth for its own sake and which makes money (or celebrity) an end in itself is not a good one.
America was founded on noble ideals, including the pursuit of happiness. Our wealth has become such that many citizens can get an unimaginable amount of material wealth, but, as he noted:
the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life, and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition permeates all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development.
He saw a society in which:
Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counterbalanced by the young people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.
It is hard to see that nearly forty years later, things are any better; here, as elsewhere, Solzhenitsyn prophesied aright. He identified the reasons for this very well:
Without any censorship, in the West, fashionable trends of thought are carefully separated from those that are not fashionable. Nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally, your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day
The West was, he said, ‘spiritually exhausted’. The ‘human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.’
The origin of this decadence lay, Solzhenitsyn suggested, in the anthropocentric views of man’s destiny which came in with the secular thinking of the Enlightenment. Man was at the centre of all things, and the ends for which he was meant were material ones:
Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our day there is a free and constant flow. Mere freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.
But these are not the ends for which man is made, and so even if he reaches them, he is dissatisfied and his spirit unsatisfied. So it is that even in the richest society the world has ever known, even the rich lack what is needed to heal what ails them? We can reject God and make gods of ourselves. But Solzhenitsyn did not see that as bringing us what we needed; and forty-five years on, we can see, even more clearly, that like Jeremiah, he was a prophet to whom few wanted to listen.
Webster’s defines Eugenics as, “a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed”. Pretty innocuous, isn’t it? It merely means that as we have children we should be aware that our characteristics; looks, intelligence, and such, will likely carry on. In other words, we should find smart, attractive, whatever matters to you, partners. I think we all knew that even before 1883 when the term was coined.
But what about this, Iceland has all but eradicated Down’s Syndrome. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? A real victory for eugenics. Or is it? Iceland has done this by aborting just about every unborn baby that shows a possibility of Down’s. Rather a different sort of thing, I think.
The worst part is that they seem proud of it. David Harsanyi writing in The Federalist(and you really should read it) tells us:
Now, the word “eradication” typically implies that an ailment is being cured or beaten by some technological advancement. Not so in this case. Nearly 100 percent of women who receive positive tests for Down syndrome in that small nation end up eradicatingtheir pregnancies. Iceland averages only one or two Down syndrome children per year, and this seems mostly a result of parents receiving inaccurate test results.
It’s just a matter of time until the rest of the world catches up. In the United States around 67 percent of women who find out their child will be born with Down syndrome opt to have an abortion. In the United Kingdom it’s around 90 percent. More and more women are taking these prenatal tests, and the tests are becoming increasingly accurate.
For now, however, Iceland has completed one of the most successful eugenics programs in the contemporary world. If you think that’s overstated, consider that eugenics — the word itself derived from Greek, meaning “well born” — is nothing more than an effort to control breeding to increase desirable heritable characteristics within a population. This can be done through “positive” selection, as in breeding the “right” kinds of people with each other, or in “negative” selection, which is stopping the wrong kinds of people from having children.
Now, as a general rule Down’s Syndrome is not inheritable, and this story “reflects a relatively heavy-handed genetic counseling,” as geneticist Kari Stefansson admits in a video. One is led to ask, what else can we control for in our kids? Want one son and maybe a daughter later? That can certainly be done. Why not, it’s the mother’s body, after all. Isn’t it?
But what about that child, essentially murdered even before he or she had a chance at life?
Over at Landspitali University Hospital, Helga Sol Olafsdottir counsels women who have a pregnancy with a chromosomal abnormality. They speak to her when deciding whether to continue or end their pregnancies. Olafsdottir tells women who are wrestling with the decision or feelings of guilt: ‘This is your life — you have the right to choose how your life will look like.’
Marie Stopes and Margeret Sanger must be so proud of her.
You know, back in the day, when Christianity was known as ‘The Way’, one of the markers of Christians was the way they loved each other, no matter the station, and more to our point, they did not leave unwanted children to die of exposure. As just about every other culture in antiquity did
Seems to me that for all our prattling about human rights, we’re doing a really terrible job of practicing what we preach.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead: Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved: and now we lie
In Flanders fields!
Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you, from failing hands, we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields
Most, if not all of you know that I am a Yank. Actually, I’m a rather patriotic, conservative one with a bent for military history. In the States this weekend we are observing Veterans Day, it is the day we thank our living veterans and serving service people. Your Remembrance Day is analogous to our Memorial Day which is 30 May. The short form is that it comes from Decoration Day, which in our history was the day on which the veterans of The Grand Army of the Republic decorated the graves of the veterans of our Civil War, it now honors all of our war dead. So for us, Veterans Day honors the living, although if we’re completely honest, both days honor both in the public’s mind.
But, we here in the Great Republic are aware that in the last hundred years we have never fought alone, we have, in all our wars (yes, even Vietnam, Thank You Australia) fought beside at least one other member or former member of the British Empire. In most, we have fought together with all of you. And we have been very proud to do so.
I also remember that during the Falklands, that while our government did not feel able to overtly help, for mostly political reasons, the American people, from the President on down, were cheering for you. You guys weren’t the only ones who watched the fleet sail with a tear in your eyes. And if it had been necessary, one of our light carriers, the Iwo Jima, which happened to be in refit, was being readied to be transferred to the Royal Navy. It was your war, as Vietnam was ours, but we know who our friends are.
An aside to our American readers, 10 November marked, with Pomp and Circumstance (and dancing, and a fair amount of alcohol) an event that occurred 241 years ago in Dun’s tavern in Philadelphia: the birth of those guys that Kaiser Bill called Teufel Hunden, the US Marine Corps. Ever since it has lived up to its motto of Semper Fidelis.
Most of us here have written something about Remembrance Day: Chalcedon here, Jessica here, and I did here, I’m pretty sure Geoffrey has talked about it a bit as well, but I’m darned if I can find it. I think in many ways, we said most of what there is to say.
One lesson we learned from Vietnam, is to honor in all ways and at all times our veterans, and from what I read, it may be a lesson that you have in some measure forgotten, whatever the politics of the war, it was not the fault of the soldiers, no soldier has ever wanted a war. In fact, since we don’t think our government does a good enough job of taking care of ours, we have many volunteer organizations that help them as well. Always remember them, they gave their lives willingly for your freedom.
As Americans we are proud that we were able to help defend you, during the Cold War, as the saying went, the Eastern border of the United States was the Elbe River. We meant it and the Soviets knew we meant it, and so we won. It was long, it was very costly, it was boring, it was terrifying, it was many things, it was also our privilege and our duty. But for you in Britain, it was also the repayment of a debt we owed you. We remember that during the nineteenth century, while we were busy building America (with not a few British ideas, and a lot of British capital, as well) we had proclaimed that new European colonies would not be permitted in the New World. We knew perfectly well that we were completely unable to enforce that, we also knew that Britain, for its own reasons (mostly trade) would.
We are also aware that Britain, and especially the Royal Navy was the major force that ended chattel slavery in western civilization. Sometimes we think you forget how good you have been for the world. Eventually, more than 600,000 Americans would die to end slavery here, and it was worth it, as were your efforts. And that doesn’t even touch upon the longest period of (mostly) peace between major powers, which has come to be called justifiably The Pax Brittanica. Your history in the modern world is something to be very proud of, and we, the rowdy colonials who fought a war against you to preserve our rights as Englishmen, salute you.
You are commemorating the centennial of the Great War as are we. We and the Canadians have celebrated the bicentennial of the War of 1812. It was sort of a silly war, and essentially ended status quo ante but it has echoed down 200 years of North American history because it was the making of two nations, Canada, and the United States. It is quite often referred to here as the Second War of Independence because it unified us, as it did the Canadians. The other thing it did was allow us to train up a military which would grow to become world class. We knew we were on the way when in 1814, our soldiers were able to stand toe to toe with the best in the world: The British regulars. Of course, you went on and burned Washington (Many of us wouldn’t mind much if you did it again). Nor was that the last time British troops paraded in Washington under arms. That was fifty-three years ago this month when a detachment of the Black Watch was included in President Kennedy’s funeral procession to Arlington.
But what I really wanted to talk about today are two men, both veterans of the Great War, who both won the American Medal of Honor and one the Victoria Cross as well. Both were posthumous. In fact, they were both awarded in the fall of 1921. One was a soldier of the empire, and one was an American doughboy. This is the story of the British recipient.
Yesterday morning General Pershing laid the Congressional Medal of Honour on the grave of the Unknown British Warrior in Westminster Abbey. The simple and beautiful ceremony seemed full of the promise of new and happier times. And what we call Nature appeared to have laid her approval on the hopes that it aroused.
But I have written about this before, and you can read it here. Today let us have a different perspective from the day.
A WOMAN’S TRIBUTE
The Message of the Double Line of Khaki; From the London Times, October 18, 1921
In Westminster Abbey, yesterday, General Pershing laid the American Medal of Honour upon the grave of the Unknown Soldier of Britain. The bright sunlight streamed through the high stained-glass windows in long shafts of light that fell warm upon the grey stone of the Gothic arches, upon the quiet people in the Nave, and around the flower-strewn tomb, and that lay in a cloth of scarlet on the flag above the body of the Unknown Dead.
A thousand years of great history stood silent within those old walls. Close by are the tombs of Norman, Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart Kings and Queens, of the priests, and soldiers and the sailors, of the poets and statesmen that have made England great.
As the organ filled the sunlit spaces of the ancient church with its deep volume of sound, there marched up the aisle, with bared heads, a detachment of British soldiers from the Guard’s regiments. As they formed a line facing the centre, an equal number of American soldiers, bare-headed, marched up the other side, and turning, stood facing the British soldiers across the narrow aisle.
Both lines of khaki, both lines of straight and young and clear-eyed boys, both lines of men of Anglo-Saxon blood, of the same standards and of the same ideals they stood there in the sunlight in that shrine of a thousand years of memory, looking straight into each other’s eyes.
Between them, up the aisle, marched the choir in their scarlet vestments with their bright cross on high, the generals, the admirals, and the Ministers of the Empire, and the Ambassador and the Commanding General of the Great Republic but in all that they represented, and in all that was said in the ceremonies that followed, there was no such potent symbol as those two lines of khaki- clad boys, with the sun shining on their bared heads, their brave young faces, and their strong young bodies, looking each other straight in the face.Between them lay, not the narrow aisle, but a thousand leagues of sea, the building of a new world, the birth of a new destiny for man. But as they stood there where they could have touched hands in the old Abbey which was a shrine for their common ancestors, they were so amazingly alike in bearing and appearance that they ceased to be a detachment of soldiers from two different countries, and they became a symbol of the illimitable potentiality of a common heritage that heritage of which the ancient Abbey was a shrine the heritage of the ideals of freedom, of order, of self-discipline, of self-respect.
If any words spoken in the Abbey could have conveyed a hundredth part of what that double line of clear- eyed boys said in utter silence the world would have been a happier place to-day. The old strength and the new force of a common heritage stood in khaki in the aisle of Westminster Abbey bare-headed, to honour the symbol of supreme sacrifice to those ideals in the Cross of Christ and in the body of an Unknown Soldier.
The service included this.
It has been a very long century since that last quiet August weekend of the Edwardian Age. It has been filled far too often with the roar of the guns, and the rattle of musketry followed by the sounding of the Last Post. But the mission has been maintained, it will never be won, although we can and should pray that it will be less horrific going forward. But all around the world, freedom-loving people have learned of the steadfast valor even unto death of English-speaking soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. We are proud of our part, yes. But we are equally proud to be your allies and friends.
Has it been worth it? The citizen of Ypres, Belgium seem to think so. Every night at 8:00pm since 2 July 1928, except during the German occupation in World War II, they have executed this ceremony, and when the Polish forces liberated them in 1944, they resumed, while heavy fighting was still going on in the city. While under occupation in World War II the ceremony took place at Brookwood Military Cemetery, in Surrey, England.
Every night
For The Fallen
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
All Muslims are exhorted to the greater jihad, to strive against the flesh and persevere in the purposes of Allah, but not all jihad is holy war. All Muslims are not Islamists, but Muslims are becoming terrorists. It is futile, patronising and dangerous to deny it. Islamists are extremists who kill the innocent; Muslims who are moderate and enlightened seek to worship in peace. Islam is not all about oppressing, torturing, murdering and slaughtering. It just seems like it.
The point that he, Chalcedon, and I are trying to make is simply that Moslems amongst us are, like we are, all different.
This morning I came across a Facebook post by Amir Khan, one of the top welterweight fighters in the world, and British by the way. His post exemplifies my point.
From the source link:
“Mr. Khan’s post was wildly popular; it got 148,000 likes and 126,000 shares. Wow, Facebook must love that sort of action!
Not exactly: Facebook responded by deleting Khan’s account. But it was restored after Facebook said the deletion was a “mistake.” “
Well, you can draw your own conclusions about that, I’ve certainly drawn mine.
But a whole lot of that often elusive thing, common sense, from a young British Moslem.
This has been a week when most of the news in Christianity has been by the Anglican Communion. Jess has ably (as always) defended her church, and its very unwieldy mandate as the Church of England. In a very diverse country, such as England, that’s a recipe for a continuous uproar, made worse by parts of the communion being apt, in her memorable term, “to throw their toys from the pram”.
I’m always sympathetic because I was brought up in the American form of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia that hot mess that Kaiser Frederick William III of Prussia made when he force brigaded the Lutheran and Reformed churches together after the Napoleonic Wars. It too had the uneasy mission of both serving God, and being all thing to all (Protestant) people. It actually fared much the same with the same forces tearing it apart, until the second world war pretty much killed it. Remember much of Prussia is now Poland. In Germany it is now part of the Union of Evangelical Churches, and in America part of the steeply declining United Church of Christ, an even worse product of the go-go sixties.
But the CofE soldiers on, and the baton is increasingly passing to the much more orthodox African-led GAFCON, which includes the breakaway Anglican Church in North America, which is small but growing.
But this is about Jess’ continued and continuing defense of her church, which puts her amongst probably the majority of her sensible and tolerant co-religionists. She started early as this post from 2012 shows
English: Flag of the Anglican Communion (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Church of England seems to attract few defenders. Some from the Catholic wing have crossed the Tiber to the Ordinariate; others on the liberal wing seem indistinguishable from secular liberals; and there is always the Archbishop of Canterbury to criticise when all other news fails. Sometimes it seems as though ‘the centre cannot hold’; and yet it does.
The Church of England is a compromise. It is not the hard-line Protestantism of Edward VI, neither is it the return to Catholicism of Mary I. To those who like firm lines of definition, this looks like a fault; to those of us who wish for a degree of comprehensiveness, it is a virtue. It reminds me of the definition of Christ’s two natures agreed at Chalcedon. The ancestors of the Copts found it too Nestorian, whilst the Nestorians found it made insufficient concessions to their position. Any such comparison should not be pressed too hard; but the point is that any widely accepted set of formulae will have within them things which those who want sharp definitions won’t like – and that in dealing with the Infinite Mystery of the Economy of our salvation, we should beware of thinking that granularity is necessarily to be had.
Newman may have abandoned his idea of the C of E as the via media, but that does not mean he was wrong to have formulated it. Much as I admire the Roman Catholic Church, there is something in it unduly attached to legalisms and definitions, or at least that is my impression. From experience, at least at secondhand, its approach to divorced people taking communion seems to fall into that category. Annulments are a long and complex process, and whilst clearly designed to help deal with the tension between what Our Lord said and pastoral needs, they seem at once cumbersome and lacking in appreciation of the needs of the repentant sinner; the C of E’s approach recognises the latter and lacks the former.
Of course to those convinced that the Catholic Church is the Church founded by Christ, these things are, rightly, secondary, but to those of us still of the view that the C of E is the branch of Catholicism practised in these islands, they give cause for hesitation.
My Orthodox acquaintances push their argument about legalism far too far in my view, almost to the point of it becoming their version of anti-Catholicism. There is much wisdom to be gained from studying the Orthodox tradition, as there is from really knowing the Catholic one. For me, one of the virtues of where I am is that I do not have to choose between them, or reject men like Wesley, who I also regard with veneration. A typical muddled Anglican? Perhaps, but a position shared by many. That does not make it right to those for whom it seems like persistence in error; but it allows me to persist in my journey, and the Anglican Church which formed me, offers me a way of love which seeks to comprehend all who will take it.
It was two hundred and ten years ago today that Admiral Lord Nelson defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets off Trafalgar. This is one of those victories that in the modern age we seem to think was pre-ordained. It wasn’t. Two years ago Geoffrey told us here that for the most part it is no longer celebrated in the UK. That’s sad. I can only attribute that to too many of our people coming to believe that our influence on the world has been an evil one. That is not only wrong, and perhaps evil in itself, but diametrically opposed to the truth.
Sir Walter Raleigh, in A Discourse of the Invention of Ships, Anchors, Compass, &c., said this:
For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.
This was also quoted by Fleet Admiral Nimitz, on his retirement. It was true for the Elizabethans, it was true in Nelson’s time, it is true now, it will always be true. But the Anglo-Saxon powers have always been more interested in trade than pure control of the world and its people. Alfred Thayer McMahon, in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, says this with regard to the British fleet: “Those distant, storm-tossed ships, never seen by the Grande Armee, were all that stood between it and world domination.” And that is so. Our francophile president, Thomas Jefferson wrote that if Napoleon took possession of Louisiana and attempted to move an army there, “on that day we shall have to marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation”. Nor was he kidding, control of New Orleans would have (and had under the Spanish) stifled the growth of not only the Old Southwest, but also the Old Northwest, it was simply something that America could not allow, and survive.
Nor did it end there. We haven’t forgotten that during our Civil War, the French attempted to impose a Hapsburg emperor on Mexico, or that it was only thwarted in 1865, when fifty thousand battle-hardened Union troops assembled in Texas, leading to the French Foreign Legion’s most famous defeat. But we also recognize that one of the reasons that we developed as we did is that the Royal Navy was the guarantor of the Monroe Doctrine. That allowed the new world to develop at its own speed and in its own way.
We should also mention that the end of chattel slavery in the west was primarily done by the Royal Navy, which to encourage industriousness amongst its people, paid prize money for captured slavers, and the return of their cargos. Slavery ended with the deaths of a half-million white Americans, but they and the Royal Navy were both following the precepts first proposed around the time of the Revolution–in East Anglia.
Nor do I think there is any question that India, is far better off today, than it was in the days before the Raj. Gandhi himself once said that his nonviolent tactics would not have worked against a less moral people than the British, and in fact, Dr Martin Luther King said the same thing about the civil rights struggle here.
And so we come to the twentieth century, to 1941 specifically. Off Newfoundland, two convoys of warships met. One carried the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, on HMS Prince of Wales. the other carried the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, on the USS Augusta. Here was mapped the grand strategy that would allow the cousins, for that is what we were, and are, to free the world from the menace of Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan. But here’s the point: On that day in 1941, only seventy-five years ago, if you were free to speak your mind, you spoke English as your native language. All the rest of the world owes their very freedom to those distant storm-tossed ships, that won one of the world’s greatest victories, for England, and for the world.
And so, for two hundred and ten years now, the Royal Navy has drunk one toast in silence, and all free peoples should join them.
I give you, Gentlemen (and Ladies):
“The immortal memory,
of Nelson and those who fell with him”
It’s true now, as it has always been, We sleep safe in our beds because of rough men (and now women) who are prepared to do violence on our behalf.
I was moved by Chalcedon’s remarks on his family in Among the Ruins. My family’s experience is not dissimilar. Yes, there’s going to be some church history here.
My parents were brought up in the old Norwegian Synod, which became part of the American Lutheran Church, which centered mostly in the upper midwest. For the most part these are the offshoots of the Scandinavian Lutheran churches, and became probably the most conservative part of the ELCA, as it remains to this day, which is why I still belong to it. But when they moved to Indiana, there was nothing especially close, although years later the LCA and the Missouri Synod would cooperate in quite a few things.
But they ended up in the Evangelical and Reformed Church. This was essentially the Church of Prussia that King Frederick Wilhelm III forced into existence by merging the German Lutheran and Reformed churches. As you can imagine serious followers of both Luther and Calvin were dismayed, beyond endurance. This is the church that my sisters and I were all confirmed in. To this day, the window over the door of the sanctuary of my home church reads Salem Ev. and Reformed Kirche.
When they ended up in Pennsylvania, my sister and her husband ended up in the southernmost church of the old Dutch Reformed Church. I should probably note that both had been hooked into the maelstrom of the United Church of Christ, that product of the ecclesiastical merger mania of the 1960s. Like the Church of Prussia before it, it tried to yoke oxen and horses, and found it a very balky team.
My family in Pennsylvania still belong to this church, and in fact, my sister was (and my brother in law still is) a leader of the congregation. As are my nieces, who in fact are not all that much younger than I am. But interestingly, in talking with them about various things, I have found that my nieces faith is quite shallow, they are leaders, and officers of their church but, they have a fairly shallow faith. Given my experience, I put it down to belonging to a church, that is neither fish nor fowl.
My experience is somewhat different. When I moved out here, there was essentially no UCC available, and so the choice became either Lutheran or Methodist. It wasn’t a very hard choice to go back to the ELCA, essentially it was coming home after a generation. 🙂
But you know, the ELCA is not the LCA that I knew on summer vacations as a child growing up in Minnesota, that was never a particularly conservative church, to my mind, but the corporate ELCA is on a par with (and in communion with) the Episcopal Church in America.
And so we go back into Lutheran history a bit. When the King forced that merger in Germany, a lot of Lutherans (Calvinists too, but that’s not germane to my history) felt that he was corrupting the teachings of their churches, and when civil and even criminal penalties started being imposed, a good many left. This is when Lutheranism really got going in the United States (Australia and New Zealand, as well). This is origin of the old Buffalo Synod. It drew heavily on what is called Old Lutheranism.
There was another group, from Saxony, which founded a synod based on mostly Neo-Lutheranism, which developed in reaction against theological rationalism and pietism, with an increased focus on Lutheran distinctiveness and and the Lutheran Confessions, as well as the historic liturgy. It paralleled the rise of Anglo-Catholicism and in fact is occasionally called German Puseyism. This is the origin of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. Over time it became the second largest Lutheran synod in the United States.
Interestingly the ELCA, because of its full communion with the Episcopal Church, is (maybe, kind of, sort of, I haven’t yet figured out if there is an authoritative answer) in communion with the Church of England, and it shares many of its problems. As do many of the liberal churches (I would say it because of a lack of vision, in the faith and too much subservience to the state).
But the LCMS has also formed partnerships with the Evangelical Lutheran Churches across Europe and the world, which are in many cases the remnants of the old Lutheran churches in Germany. Even in the UK, where is 1896 a group of German bakers in Kent, asked Concordia Seminary in St. Louis to provide a pastor for them with assurances that they would support him. That mission has now grown to have churches in England, Scotland, and Wales, including training pastors in Cambridge.
If you know me, you know that I will likely at some point end up in the LCMS, simply because it matches better what I believe, or even what is often its subset: The Confessional Lutheran Church. A lot of the reason I haven’t is practical, the difference between five blocks and about fifty miles.
But I’m hardy alone in that yearning, the ELCA is at best flat in its membership and in many cases drying up, while LCMS is continuing to grow. That tracks with what I see in other denominations, the more demanding churches are growing while the ‘go along to get along’ ones are not. I think it more a matter of vision and the mission than anything else.
In many ways I think the development of the various churches in the United states almost makes a laboratory case for their predecessor churches in Europe, because here without state support, they have to make their case to the parishioner, That can, of course, lead to apostasy but it can also lead to real piety, depending on how well the people understand the purpose of the church, itself.
And so I continue to wonder if a good part of the Anglican church’s problem isn’t simply that it has, as the Established Church, this mandate from the state to be all things to all men, instead of a church serving only God. It never worked all that well for Rome, or in Germany, maybe it’s run it course in England as well, or maybe it simply needs to wrest control, once again, from the state and entrust it to men of vision. Because, historically, it has been one of the mainstays of the Faith, and I would hate to see it go down.
In truth, because I suspect, of Virginia’s influence on our early history, it (in its Episcopal form) has become our church for state functions as well. Where else but the National Cathedral could one have a state funeral for a Protestant?
This also raises an issue about the health of the church and society in general, which is the difference in outlook between the generations which needs to be healthily discussed with perhaps confession on both sides. “Boys don’t cry” is a Victorian fallacy that people my age have rejected – but it grieves us to be at variance with our fathers. Who’s advocating for our heartache?
To which I replied with this
Be careful, Nick. Yes, we were taught that but there was a lot more to it than “Boys don’t cry’. What it really was, was a lesson in self discipline. What it really said was, “Boys (actually, men) don’t cry-in public because they have work to do.” They felt things just as you do.
In my family, you rarely get more than a handshake-the first time I ever hugged my brother in law was about 2 years ago at my sister’s funeral, and I’m in my sixties. I never thought he didn’t feel things, he’s buried one daughter, and his parents and all those things but, his duty was to keep the family going, and he did..
Kipling may be the best Victorian example we have, read his “My boy, Jack” or even better the video of it. He was no different from you (or I) he just did his duty first, and grieved later and privately. That is the Northern European ethos, and it always has been, It’s also why (in good measure) our society is less corrupt than others, we keep our eye on the ball.
My dad’s line was illustrative. when I’d get the normal bangs and bruises of an active little boy, and whine about it, dad would always comment, “I didn’t feel a thing”. Now, I don’t notice even when I spring a leak, if I’m doing something, there’s time for that later.
But the other example I use is that when I was about sixteen, we were painting a car, and the thinner splashed into my eye. Dad happened to look at me (I don’t remember that I said anything, but I couldn’t open my eye. Mom was watering the flower bed and dad yelled at her (and this is nearly the only time I heard him raise his voice) for her to bring the hose over. She was completely unaware and said effectively, “What?”
Dad’s answer for the only time I ever heard him say it was, “Bring that f***ing hose here!” I found out later that no one had heard him use that word since about 1935 but, it mattered right then.
One does what is necessary to accomplish the mission, that’s what it’s all about, it’s not about our feelings.
But let’s expand a bit on that. Nobody that I know of is advocating for anybody’s heartache, we all have that, and we have in all our generations. In fact, I’d guess that we have less cause for it than any generation before us, whichever generation we are a member of. But we’re always going have some. Essentially, that’s life.
There’s nothing particularly Victorian about it either. We tend to think so because that is the literature that we read. But if you read Beowulf, or the Icelandic Sagas, or indeed the Bible, you’ll find the same themes, it comes down to growing into manhood. It’s not easy, in fact, it’s very difficult, and how well a society does it, is one of the measures of that society’s viability.
The difference with the Victorians was that they openly talked about duty, more than most societies that came before them. A good example is this.
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
And the great thing about the Victorians was that they not only ‘talked the talk’ (very well), they ‘walked the walk’ as well. I mentioned this in my comment quoted above. Jessica introduced it to us and explained its background.
We’d do well, I think to quit denigrating them and attempt to live up to their example.
“Whatever you do, do it with your whole heart.” ( Colossians 3: 23 ) - The blog of Father Richard Peers SMMS, Director of Education for the Diocese of Liverpool
Yesterday we celebrated the 75th anniversary of the fall of Rome, and at 0630 British Double Summer Time tomorrow the liberation of France started, also 75 years ago. Thus setting up a pincers attack on Nazi Germany. This was the climax of the European war, not the end of the beginning but the beginning of the end.
Webster’s defines Eugenics as, “a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed”. Pretty innocuous, isn’t it? It merely means that as we have children we should be aware that our characteristics; looks, intelligence, and such, will likely carry on. In other words, we should find smart, attractive, whatever matters to you, partners. I think we all knew that even before 1883 when the term was coined.
This has been a week when most of the news in Christianity has been by the Anglican Communion. Jess has ably (as always) defended her church, and its very unwieldy mandate as the Church of England. In a very diverse country, such as England, that’s a recipe for a continuous uproar, made worse by parts of the communion being apt, in her memorable term, “to throw their toys from the pram”.
All Along the Watchtower 
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