Something Cheerful

Piano Concerto No. 10 by W. A. Mozart

Something Mournful

A true picture of nearly any place in the West today, from Sydney, Australia, to Atlanta, Georgia.

'Slough'

By Sir John Betjeman

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow
    Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans
    Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town--
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half-a-crown
    For twenty years,

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
    In women’s tears,

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
    And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
    They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
    To Maidenhead

And talk of sports and makes of cars
In various bogus Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
    But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
    And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
    The earth exhales.

Works Cited - John Betjeman, Collected Poems, New York: FSG, 2006, pgs. 20-1.

The importance of Russia to the Future of the World

There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end.  I allude to the Russians and the Americans. . . . Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe. -- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part I (originally published in 1835), edited and abridged by Richard D. Heffner, New York: Signet Classic, 1^st edition, 2001, pgs. 141-2.

Is post-Lincoln America the most important nation in the world, the one poised to do the most good for all the peoples of the earth?  Those who believe the New England-Puritan dogma that the U.S. is a ‘city on a hill’ with a God-given mission (and right) to remake the world in its own image will say Yes.  Those who have escaped that heresy and looked into history a bit more deeply and widely will come to a different answer: Russia.

That statement will no doubt produce shock, anger, disbelief, and all manner of other exclamations of surprise in the minds and hearts and mouths of those raised on a steady diet of ‘American exceptionalism’.  This is understandable in the light of the stigma still attached to the Russian people because of the barbarity of atheistic communism that dominated them for so much of the 20^th century.  That, however, was an aberration, a forced subjugation to outsiders who despised the centuries-old traditional Christian culture of the bulk of the Russian people, which we in the South know something about.  But since we have seen the direction of the world under so-called American leadership - crushing debt, war following upon war, slavery to international corporations, government rules written to manage every aspect of life - it is nevertheless a notion that needs to have a proper hearing in all its dimensions, physical and spiritual.

I. Russia’s Physical Importance

Dr Joseph Farrell makes the case briefly for why Russia is the most significant place in the world, in terms of physical location and natural resources:

‘In short, I think what we are looking at here is as much a geopolitical crisis as an economic one, and the stakes are quite high.  By way of background, we would do well to remember one overarching geopolitical principle adhered to by the Western oligarchs since it was first enunciated by British geopolitician Sir Halford MacKinder: He who controls the Eurasian heartland (by which he meant Eastern Europe and a considerable portion of Eurasian Russia)  controls the World Island (by which he meant the great world island comprised of Europe, Asia, and Africa). He who controls the world island, with the bulk of the world’s resources, controls the world.  It is important to recall that as recently as Zbbnw Brzznsk’s (that’s Zbigniew Brzezinski to those unfamiliar with my vowelless disdain for the man) The Grand Chessboard this geopolitical dogma of the Western oligarchs has simply been “revised and extended” but not abandoned.

‘Remember that struggle for the Eurasian Heartland, for it explains much of modern history: the turn of the German General Staff from the West to the East during World War One, the harsh terms imposed by Imperial Germany on Russia at Russia’s surrender in 1918 and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; it explains Hitler’s obsession with Lebensraum and eastward expansion at Russia’s expense, and in short, the basic tension between those two powers. Bear Germany and Russia in mind, because we will return to it in this article, for the nightmare of western geopolitics (besides Cardinal Richlieu’s nightmare of a unified German state) is a rapprochement between those two states. This in large part explains the shockwaves felt in Whitehall and the City of London when Hitler and Stalin concluded their infamous 1939 Non-Aggression Pact.’

http://gizadeathstar.com/2013/03/cyprus-clash-of-oligarchies-and-geopolitics-part-one/

Father Andrew Phillips continues this line of thought:

‘We know for a fact that the 1917 Revolution in Russia was organised and implemented by the Western Powers in order to destroy Russia, its rival, one which, in their own words, would have become more powerful than any Western country by 1950. Therefore, British and the Americans sent Trotsky and the Germans sent Lenin to carry out the Revolution in Russia. We also now know that the order to assassinate the Tsar and his family actually came directly from New York – just as the Tsar himself had predicted it would, some ten years before. The Soviet Union was a purely Western foundation, founded on the Western ideology of Marxism.

‘However, in creating the Soviet Union, the West made a strategic mistake, a rod for its own back, because of course the Soviet Union became very powerful, the second ‘Superpower’. This was not as the West had intended, for the Nazis were supposed to destroy the Soviet Union. The West had not counted on historic patriotism and sense of national identity, a movement far deeper than the superficial Soviet Union. Therefore, when the Soviet Union fell, over twenty years ago now, the West’s greatest fear was that a free and independent Russia would be born, that, having thrown off its shell, the tortoise underneath it would turn out to be a hare. Hence the ‘Wild East’ chaos which the West encouraged in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s with its ‘divide and rule’ policies and privatisation. This was nothing more than institutionalised theft from the people.

‘The problem for the West came in the year 2000 when Russia finally recognised that it had to recover from this ‘Wild East’ Capitalism, the Mafia State, and set out on the very, very long path of recovery under President Putin. Therefore, the West had to destroy Putin. In some respects, he is an easy target because he rules over a post-Soviet country, still full of that corruption and mafia mentality introduced there in the 1990s. Therefore, it is easy to attack Putin’s Russia (although it is doubtful if the amount of corruption there is any greater in reality than in the EU or the USA) and Putin has been lamentably slow and weak in tackling corruption.

‘Thus, what really upsets the Western elite is the fear that Russia may yet free itself from this corruption and the former Russian Empire largely reconstituted in a Eurasian Confederation. The only focus of Russian unity, the multinational Russian Orthodox Church, is also the only force which can overcome post-Soviet amorality. Both Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright have made it clear that they are utterly opposed to the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church and want to dismember Russia – much as Hitler planned to do. So Western so-called ‘NGO’s and Evangelical ‘missionaries’ have done their best to undermine the authority of the Church, even publishing attacks on the Church in the ‘Economist’ and the ‘Harvard Business Review’!’

http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/a-recent-interview/

Following Fr Andrew’s cue, then, let us transition from the material to the ghostly.

II. Russia’s Spiritual Importance

Even more important than Russia’s vast potential for material power and sway is her Christian influence.  This is where she will do her greatest good for the world, if she will repent of her past sins and strive once more to be the Lord’s servant with all her heart.  A prophecy of some 1,000 years ago at St Sabbas’s Monastery makes this clear (as do other similar prophecies throughout the centuries):

‘At various times this great people [the Russians] will fall into sin and for this will be chastised through considerable trials. In about a thousand years [i.e. in the 1900s] this people, chosen by God, will falter in its Faith and its standing for the Truth of Christ. It will become proud of its earthly might and glory, will cease to seek the Kingdom and will want paradise not in Heaven but on this sinful earth.

‘However not all this people will tread this broad and pernicious path, though a substantial majority will, especially its governing class. On account of this great fall, a terrible fiery trial will be sent from on high to this people which will despise the ways of God. Rivers of blood shall flow across their land, brother shall slay brother, more than once famine shall visit the land and gather its dread harvest, nearly all the churches and other holy places shall be destroyed or suffer sacrilege, many shall perish.

‘A part of this people, rejecting iniquity and untruth, will pass over the borders of their homeland and will be dispersed like unto the people of the Jews all over the world. Nevertheless the Lord will not show His wrath on them to the uttermost. The blood of thousands of martyrs will cry to the heavens for mercy. A spirit of sobriety will grow among this chosen people and they will return to God. At last this period of cleansing trial, appointed by the Righteous Judge, will come to an end, and once more Holy Orthodoxy will shine forth and those northern lands will be resplendent with the brightness of a faith reborn.

‘This wonderful light of Christ will shine forth from there and enlighten all the peoples of the earth. This will be helped by that part of the people providentially sent ahead into the diaspora, who will create centres of Orthodoxy - churches of God all over the world. Christianity will then be revealed in all its heavenly beauty and fullness. Most of the peoples of the world will become Christian. And for a time a period of peace, prosperity and Christian living will come to the whole world...

‘And then? Then, when the fullness of time has come, a great decline in faith will begin and everything foretold in the Holy Scriptures will occur. Antichrist will appear and the world will end’  (Archbishop Seraphim of Chicago, ‘Sud'by Rossii’, Pravoslavnij Vestnik, (The Orthodox Herald), № 87, January-February, 1996 (Canada, in Russian); Fomin, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Sergiev Posad, 1994, pgs. 316-318; translated in Fr Andrew Phillips, Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition, English Orthodox Trust, 1995, pgs. 299-300.  Quoted in Vladimir Moss, The Restoration of Romanity: Essays in Orthodox Political Theology, 2012, Pgs. 221-2.  Accessed 24 May 2013.  PDF copy available at http://www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com/downloads/373_THE_RESTORATION_OF_ROMANITY_3_.pdf).

III.  What about the Tsar?

Given all the slander heaped upon the Tsars of Russia in standard history books, it would not be surprising to find some readers who might be less than enthusiastic about their reappearance.  Be not afraid.  Returning to Fr Andrew Phillips, he was asked in an interview, ‘Do you look for a restoration of the Orthodox Tsar in the future and is Orthodoxy intrinsically monarchist ultimately in its political leanings?’

He answered:

‘The Orthodox Churches live and have lived in all countries and under all sorts of regimes: Pagan, Communist, post-Soviet, Fascist, Capitalist, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim etc. However, history shows that the Church is able to influence society for the best when there is an Orthodox monarch.

‘Here we must emphasise that the Orthodox use of the word ‘monarch’ means something quite different from the Western usage. In the West it means a right-wing figure, who is extremely powerful and rich and uses that power and wealth to exploit for egotistical purposes, a kind of permanent Tony Blair or any other self-deluded narcissistic megalomaniac. Conversely, in Orthodox language, a monarch means a popular monarch, whose power and wealth exist only for the people’s benefit. His sovereignty is the reflection of the people’s sovereignty. Christian monarchy is where the people are the guarantor of the monarchy and vice versa. That is quite different from the absolutist and despotic monarchies with which Western history is littered. In 1917 Russia fell because of thoroughly corrupt and self-serving aristocrats, oligarchs as we would call them today, who connived with foreign powers, overthrew the monarchy and betrayed the monarch-loving peasants and workers, whom they ruthlessly exploited.

‘Prophecies, which are always conditional, clearly state that, if the whole Russian nation repents, a suitable candidate will appear to be Tsar again, just as in 1613 after the Polish invasion. All Russian Orthodox, and all conscious Non-Russian Orthodox, look forward to this possible restoration, because it will change the whole future of the world for the better, rebalancing it and turning it away from its present, suicidal course.’

http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/a-recent-interview/

IV.  A Clearer Picture of Holy Russia

To help the reader grasp just what Russia really is, a poem by the Russian poet Sergei Bekhteyev, ‘The Tsar’s Russia’, translated by Fr Andrew, is presented below.  For poems often express truths better than prose.

‘The Tsar’s Russia’

(Nice, France, 30 May 1952; nearly 34 years after the martyrdom of the last Tsar, St Nicolas II, and his family at the hands of the Bolsheviks)

The Tsar’s Russia is meekness and lowliness,

Ardent prayers before the icons centuries old,

Thirst for repentance and sweet all-forgiveness,

Brave sacrifice in the noble battle bold.

The Tsar’s Russia is the speaking of church bells,

Merry joy at the welcome with bread and salt,

Amid the sleeping pines, monks’ ancient log cells,

Lips that whisper of deep-held love without fault.

The Tsar’s Russia - the service of the nation,

The firm guardian of order and of peace,

Friendship of her peoples and every station,

The age-old surplus generous enough for ease.

The Tsar’s Russia - the life of the tales of yore,

Harmony of family life, freedom’s order,

Our mighty tongue, life lived as ever before,

Bravery and courage in the dance taught her.

The Tsar’s Russia is faith in the soldiers’ feat,

In triumph and glory of rule wise and royal,

In the graced destiny sent from heaven’s seat,

To the great home of honest service and toil.

The Tsar’s Russia is help for the poor brother,

Valiant defence from threat of foreign land,

The tender embrace of the happy mother,

The tears that are wiped away by the kind hand.

The Tsar’s Russia – this is our fair native song,

The endless high road leading to every sight,

The Tsar’s Russia is Holy Rus great and strong,

She Who believes in God, She Who seeks the right.

This poem and two others like it by the same author are available here:

http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/ruspoems.htm

V.  A Crossroad

Seeing all this - the decline of Washington City and much of the West into ever deeper corruption of body and soul, and the slow rise of Russia from a terrible pit of darkness back to her Christian moorings - the South has a decision to make:  Continue in league with and under the control of Washington City, or separate from that vile place and begin cultivating ties with the better parts of Russia, such as the Church, the villages, and the royal family, and of the other nations of the Slavic world (Serbia, Romania, et al.).  Is it not better to suffer with the righteous in their struggles than to live a life of ease in the comfortable cities of the wicked?

This Memorial Day . . .

Celebrate a foundational American principle:  secession!

If it was a good idea for the British colonies in 1776, for these same States again from 1787-90, the nations of South America in the 19th century, East Timor, South Sudan, the republics of the former Soviet Union, and Ireland over the last 100 years, and for Scotland and Catalonia in the near future, then it is surely still a good idea for Alaska, Vermont, Texas, Tennessee, etc. today if they find that the federal government has become a harmful burðen to them, rather than a boon.

A Prediction Not Yet Come True

Hopefully, though, we are getting ever closer to its fulfilment.

From 2008:

'A leading Russian political analyst has said the economic turmoil in the United States has confirmed his long-held view that the country is heading for collapse, and will divide into separate parts.

'. . .

'He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong.' (Emphasis added.)

The complete story from RIA Novosti is here.

A Prediction Come True

'The multiplication of the paths of exchange will soon lead to its logical conclusion, and we will only see on the market those goods produced by the most miserable of peoples.  The Chinese will become the world's best workers because they only require that their animal needs be met.  Later, the worker, the engineer, the salesman, and the banker himself will be purchased on the open market.  Then the banker of London, Paris, or Vienna, having made himself rich by putting his capital to work in China, will in turn face an unequal struggle against the Chinese usurer, who will not give himself the luxuries of a princely palace, teams of horses, parties, and the life of the rich.  An irremediable decline awaits the economic order of the civilization of the West at the end of this path of freedom of labor, a path down which it is led by the teaching of the philosophers, the science of the economists, and the power of the capitalists.' -- René de La Tour du Pin, 'On the Corporate Régime' (1883), Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition, C. O. Blum, ed., Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2004, p. 326.

It is long past time to rethink the rules governing our political economy, from farming to heavy manufacturing, if wish to be more than paper pushers for giant international corporations or welfare recipients of giant governments.  That is the direction we are moving unless we take the difficult steps needed to reintroduce morality into economics, so that small family farms and businesses can be secure in their property and livelihood from generation to generation.

Control, Part II: Is This What Gay 'Marriage' Is Really All About?

Destroying the family so the central government will be able to touch every body and soul directly, without having to bother even with a mother and a father?

From 'Biopolitical Tyranny?', by Patrick J. Deneen, Front Porch Republic:

'Why is it that nearly every elite institution – news station, newspaper, sit-com, talk-show, school, university, and so on – has made gay-marriage the object of its most fervent devotions, not children growing up without fathers?

'What of other issues that might be on the agenda?  Too big to fail?  Imperial overreach?  Drone strikes?  Massive and growing inequality between the well-off and the working class?  Yes, those are problems.  But is every elite institution devoting anything comparable to similar energies to any of these issues as they are to the drumbeat of “marriage equality”?

'Which leads me to think that Milbank is onto something.  All these other issues are just policy matters on which reasonable people can disagree.  Gay marriage, on the other hand, is an extension of a 500-year agenda of remaking every social institution in the image and likeness of liberalism – the autonomous rights-bearing individual freely consenting to, and identifying primarily with, the liberal State.  The family was an intractable challenge and its undefining was liberalism’s ultimate goal.  Gay marriage is the political vehicle on which reproductive technologies will now be enabled to finally remake that most recalcitrant institution.  The fact that every other institution has already been effectively reordered by liberalism’s logic – regions, States, neighborhoods, schools, universities, and churches – has made even the family fairly easy prey.  If it weren’t happening before our eyes, it would make for a pretty good science-fiction novel.'

And when all things shall be subdued unto the central government, then shall the father and mother also themselves be subject unto it that put all things under itself, that government may be all in all.  (Modification of I Corinthians 15:28, KJV)

Control, Part I: Reviving Prohibition

More proof that the spirit of the New England-Puritan busy-body is alive and well in totalitarian Washington, D.C.: the federal National Transportation Safety Board is pressuring the States to lower the legal blood alcohol level to ridiculous levels.

The thirst of the elite to direct  even our smallest affairs cannot seemingly be slaked.

Humane Economists Strike Back

A couple of lights glimmered forth this week in the realm of political economy.

First, Pope Francis lashed consumerism-industrialism, saying things like 'The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.'

The full story from The Telegraph.

Next, Dr Ovidiu Hurduzeu tries to help ground distributism in Trinitarian soil, to ground it in reality rather than abstract speculation.  Here are a few of the compelling passages from his essay 'Insights into a Distributist Trinitarian Worldview':

'It is not enough to say that persons mutually constitute each other through concrete relationality. Genuine human relations need to be “eventlike” because Jesus Christ is the Event, “on which all other events  are based, an event which took place in history, and an event which is produced in the life of people, an event which sums up and guarantees all other events, personal or historical, and renders history and life absolutely irreversible”. Only in Jesus Christ and His Church, the self  can  grow into a person, a body-event. We are not only witnesses to the Christ-event; in the Eucharist, we appropriate Him in our body, we are in the Event. For our whole life we are struggling to grow in our experience of the Holy Spirit so that we might shine forth like body-events.

'Any event is localized (rooted in a certain time and place), it originates in a point and unfolds into an event-like situation. An event is neither an accident nor an incident, it is transformative, an augmented reality – it is tension towards perfection. Only localness, all that is in situ, what is concretely localized can grow into an event. Localness should not be the rural desert of today, the sleepy, “interchangeable” little towns where nothing happens. If today the local is a desert, this is partly because Christianity has neglected its Trinitarian tradition; accordingly, everything personalized became gradually homogenized and, since the event of the Incarnation until the event of the Second Coming of Christ, nothing really happened—all history is homogeneous.

'How to live our daily life like an event? How to bring back an event-like existence to the local community?

'It is not enough to re-localize the market, to grow your own vegetables or to “buy local” and attend “local events”. First, we need to transform our lives and cultivate event-like relationships through an ethic of gift and reception. Rather than “local community events,” we need “community as an event,” a “pluripersonal symphony” (D. Stăniloae) following the model of a perichoretic personal unity of the Holy Trinity: “[…] in the Church, the human persons of the faithful are united with the person of Christ all the more in action and will and through a unity which includes them, without the persons being merged into a single person. Each of them moves around the others and within the others, in a perichoresis, in a reciprocal interiority, which preserves the existence of each and yet develops it… in this reciprocal interiority between us and Christ, he is the center of gravity for us, as the same unifying sun, since we all are in him."'

The complete essay is found at The Distributist Review web site.

One of the Best Books a Southerner Could Read This Year: 'The Blue Lady of Sycamore Hill'

It is not a long book.  It does not contain intricate theories of government.  But it is remarkable, and this is because it shows what a great nation truly is: the lived faith of the people, their close ties to the land and weather, the language, the sufferings experienced in common.  Southerners will see many things they have in common with the Lemko people, and, if we are wise, we might also perceive through their experiences how we can endure our present oppression and how we can reach our goal of freedom.

Mash here to learn more about The Blue Lady of Sycamore Hill.

At Home in the South (Mostly): G. K. Chesterton

In such a cheerful man as Chesterton - poetic, laughsome, defender of many of the old Christian creeds, storyteller, scalder of Puritans - it is not difficult to see one who would get along just fine in the Southland.  He very nearly admitted as much in his book, What I Saw in America.  For example, in the chapter entitled 'Lincoln and Lost Causes', he wrote,

'At least two Cavaliers had been in the field before any Puritans. And they had carried with them much more of the atmosphere and nature of the normal Englishman than any Puritan could possibly carry. They had established it especially in Virginia, which had been founded by a great Elizabethan and named after the great Elizabeth. Before there was any New England in the North, there was something very like Old England in the South. Relatively speaking, there is still.'

And later,

'Now if it were a matter of making foreigners feel the real humours and humanities of England, there are no Americans so able or willing to do it as the Americans of the Southern States. As I have already hinted, some of them are so loyal to the English humanities, that they think it their duty to defend even the English inhumanities. New England is turning into New Ireland. But Old England can still be faintly traced in Old Dixie. It contains some of the best things that England herself has had, and therefore (of course) the things that England herself has lost, or is trying to lose. But above all, as I have said, there are people in these places whose historic memories and family traditions really hold them to us, not by alliance but by affection.'

His support for widely distributed property (land, tools of production, etc.), for the strong, virtuous, self-sufficient family and local community over against the centralized, collectivized, corrupt, industrial centre finds much support in traditional Southern thought and life.  And so we nod in sad assent when we read,

'The Northern slavery, industrial slavery, or what is called wage slavery, is not decaying but increasing; and the end of it is not yet.'

However, one thing Mr Chesterton would find disagreeable is the mind of the South toward Lincoln.  He does not shy away from some of his shortcomings:

'Above all, they know nothing about the respect in which Lincoln was quite un-English, was indeed the very reverse of English; and can be understood better if we think of him as a Frenchman, since it seems so hard for some of us to believe that he was an American. I mean his lust for logic for its own sake, and the way he kept mathematical truths in his mind like the fixed stars. He was so far from being a merely practical man, impatient of academic abstractions, that he reviewed and revelled in academic abstractions, even while he could not apply them to practical life.'

But in the end he comes to the woeful conclusion that

'If Lincoln was right, he was right in guessing that there was not really a Northern nation and a Southern nation, but only one American nation. And if he has been proved right, he has been proved right by the fact that men in the South, as well as the North, do now feel a patriotism for that American nation. His wisdom, if it really was wisdom, was justified not by his opponents being conquered, but by their being converted.'

First, as his own writings in this book show, the North and the South are two very different peoples - grim, fundamentalist Puritans and easy-going, Christian squires and yeomen.  There is not simply 'one American nation', except in the sense that all the peoples of all the States are now forcibly ruled by Washington, D.C.  Which leads to the second rebuttal, that the South was not converted to a loyalty to the American Empire by a happy and free choice.  She submitted to this foreign rule back then out of sheer necessity, under the brutal circumstances of much bleeding and starvation and things worse than these; today, because of imperial propaganda (inside the schools and out) and ignorance of her own good inheritance.

But even with these views, Mr Chesterton would have been a more than welcome addition to the Southern family if he had wished to remain here.  What family, after all, does not have disagreements from time to time?  And who is to say that he might not have changed his mind on some of these matters under the influence of works by a Col Taylor or a Rev Dabney (or by simply experiencing the life of Southern folk for an extended season)?

Wassail, Mr Chesterton!

'The War on Terror' Is a Farce

The NATO attack on Libya tore away most of the covering, but the present proxy war of NATO/Israel/the U.S. against Syria has fully revealed the lie that is The War on Terror.  The coordination of Western countries and Al-Qaeda Syrian rebels against Assad's government shows what a sham this War really is.

From Infowars.com:

'Israel’s airstrike on Syria was timed to precede an Al-Qaeda-led rebel offensive against President Bashar Al-Assad’s forces according to Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence sources, underscoring once again how jihadists are doing the dirty work of the very powers they claim to oppose.

'. . .

'As we highlighted yesterday, Israel and the United States routinely rely on Al-Qaeda to destabilize their enemies in the region.

'Not only has Israel supported Al-Qaeda-led rebels in Syria, even setting up field hospitals for injured fighters, but back in 2002 Israel was caught actually creating an Al-Qaeda group in order to justify attacks on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

'The United States and Israel have also armed and funded Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Iran to carry out bombings and assassinations for years.

'NATO powers also openly armed and funded the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic FIghting Group to topple Colonel Gaddafi in 2011.

'It was also recently revealed that the State Department hired Al-Qaeda-linked militants to “defend” the diplomatic mission in Benghazi that was later attacked.'

From Orthodox England:

'Near the city of Aleppo, armed terrorists have kidnapped the Antiochian Orthodox Metropolitan Boulos (Paul) al-Yazigi of Aleppo and Iskanderun and a Syriac Metropolitan Ibrahim. . . .

'This event is a challenge to Western countries, especially the USA, Great Britain and France. In camps in Turkey and the Jordan they are training, financing and arming the Sunni Islamist terrorists of 22 different nations who are operating in the war against Syria. Now that the Patriarch’s brother has been kidnapped (and is probably being held to ransom), will the West retract its support for Al-Qaida terrorism and support the native Christians of the Middle East?'

Rejecting The War on Terror does not mean that Muslims must therefore be embraced as model citizens of the world.  So long as they hold to the violent teachings of Muhammad in the hadiths, etc. they should be viewed with a wary eye.

But it does mean this - the next time a power-hungry demagogue like Sen Graham, Sen McCain, or Pres Obama, or a neocon, Washington, D.C.,-idolizer like Hannity or Limbaugh, calls for the bombing or invasion of another country 'because Al-Qaeda is there', our response should not be an exclamation: 'Go get 'em!' but a question: 'Who put them there, and why?'

Afterword:  Keep all of this mind also whenever you are asked (or told) to give up this freedom or that to prevent Al-Qaeda attacks here at home.

The Holy Prophet Moses, Deliverer of Israel . . . and the South?

As we go about our work here on earth to free ourselves from bondage of body, mind, and soul to a corrupt regime in Washington, D.C., we ought never to forget to seek help from Heaven as well.  Our minds and hearts, then, we ought to turn to one of the greatest deliverers the world has known, the Holy Prophet Moses, and ask him for his prayers and help.  Be assured that this saint who led his own nation of Israel out of the bondage of Egypt into the freedom of holiness is always willing to help other nations do likewise.  He is a bold intercessor before the Lord our God, for the Lord loves him, having granted him visions of Himself during the holy prophet's life that He granted to no other man.  Therefore, we cry out,

Holy Prophet Moses, pray for us sinners!

Praying to Departed Christians

For those who may be uncomfortable asking the departed saints to pray for us, remember these things:

1. God is not the God of the dead but of the living (St Matthew 22:32).

2. Christ has one body, one Church (I Corinthians 1:13, 12:12, 13, Ephesians 4:4), not two - one for the living and one for the departed.  Since we remain united with them in Christ, we may therefore continue to ask our departed brothers and sisters to pray for and help us just as we ask Christians still on earth to do so.

3. The saints in Heaven remain concerned about what is happening on earth and bring those concerns before the Lord (Revelation 6:9, 10).

4. The prayers of the righteous avail much (James 5:16).

The American Empire Crumbling?

Dr Farrell marks out some signs that the American Empire is in an advanced state of decline in his latest news video.  This could spell good and bad for the South:  good, because the demise of imperial Washington, D.C., would mean freedom for the Southern States and the other States of this unfortunate union to chart their own course; bad, because the federal dictators may lash out in their last death spasm to try to keep everything from slipping out of their grasp (confiscating property like the government in Cyprus, declaring wars abroad or martial law at home, etc.).  Let us do our best to be well prepared for any event.