Two German Rocket Scientists

Mr Federer, as is his wont, makes much of Werner von Braun’s statement about America:

After World War II, Werner von Braun, and 1,600 German scientists, surrendered to the United States in Operation Paperclip, stating: “I myself, and everybody you see here, have decided to go West. … We knew that we had created a new means of warfare. … We felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”

--https://www.wnd.com/2019/07/americas-space-race-pride-of-achievement/

We wonder, though, how much better it would have been for the world had he, instead of furthering the techo-sorcery of the American Empire of heresies and schisms, followed the path of his forerunner, Werner Meyer-Hellige, in renouncing all such scientific ‘advances’ for the sake of uniting with Christ’s True Body, the Holy Orthodox Church:

Werner Meyer-Hellige was born into a privileged German family in 1889. After a career in the German Army, in 1921, at the age of thirty-two, he inherited his father’s company, A.I. Eisfeld, a successful fireworks and explosives manufacturer.

The company was located on a vast estate, with its own railway, a small zoo, carp ponds, a park of exotic flora and an orchard, all meticulously maintained. Although Werner had had no formal scientific training, he had an inventive and practical mind and, with the help of one of his company’s engineers, he became the first person to test the idea of a multi-stage ignition system. This was the same technology that 35 years later was to launch the first satellites into space.

The invention could have doubled his fortune had the Nazis not come to power. Werner, a man of independent views, bristled at the changes introduced by the new regime. It in turn mistrusted him and in 1934 he was denounced as being disloyal and was forced to sell his factories. Unfortunately, all the data from his research went to the Nazis and was to help them build their rockets. As Germany fell into her greatest tragedy, Nazidom and Hitler’s War, Werner’s world fell apart.

After this dark period, in 1947 he met a young and very religious Russian, Elena Konstantinovna Radomanskaya. They fell in love, married, and she introduced him to a whole new world, the world of the Russian Orthodox Church. Werner was sympathetic towards his wife’s religion, but the deep personal conviction which lies at the foundation of true conversion took a long time to develop. Elena wrote to the future St John, then Archbishop of Western Europe, asking him to pray for her husband, and sent alms to Mount Athos and the Holy Land with the same request. Werner met Bishop Leonty of Geneva and he became closely acquainted with Fr Kornily in Munich, who in the world had been a mining engineer, and they had long discussions. Later, Werner also developed a correspondence with Fr Konstantin (Zaitsev) of Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville in the USA. The latter was a monk of great learning and fluent in German.

Under their combined influence Werner’s desire to embrace the Orthodox Faith matured. After the couple had moved to the Holy Land in September 1969, it was finally to come to fruition. Visiting the holy places, attending services at various monasteries and speaking with the monks and nuns all deepened Werner’s understanding of Orthodoxy. However, when he decided that he did not want to postpone baptism any longer, a real battle began.

Moments after telling his wife of his decision to be baptised, he stumbled and fell headlong on a stone floor. His wife barely managed to help him to bed. That night there was a storm and he awoke, shouting and making gestures as if fending off attackers. ‘I want to become Orthodox straightaway’, he declared. His wife explained that this was not possible, that it was the middle of the night. He calmed down, but woke up again later and said to his wife: ‘Pick up the nun’. It turned out that at that very moment a nun who had been praying for him was lying unconscious on the floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, six miles away.

The next morning Elena phoned the Russian Convent on the Mount of Olives and arrangements for the baptism were made without delay. Since Werner was still unable to get out of bed, the baptism took place in their home in Bethany. A group of nuns came together with a priest from the Convent and also Abbess Tamara, who had agreed to be Werner’s godmother. Knowing how long and diligently Werner had prepared for this occasion, they all wept for joy. Werner took the name Alexander, having been impressed by St. Alexander Nevsky’s maxim, ‘God is not in force, but in truth’ (‘Ne v sile Bog, no v pravde’). Later he said to his wife: ‘All my life I have been living at the bottom of the ocean, but now the waves have brought me to the surface, to sunlight, to freedom’.

The German pioneer of rocket technology, Werner Alexander Meyer-Hellige, was to pass away peacefully on the Feast of the Prophet Elijah, 2 August 1970, during the prayers for the departure of the soul. He was buried near the Oak of Mamre, where the Patriarch Abraham had received the Holy Trinity in the guise of Three Angels. Thus the rocketeer rose to the heavens through the charioteer.

To the Servant of God Alexander - Eternal Memory!

--Fr Andrew Phillips, http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/oegerrok.htm

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Sacred Myth and Tradition vs Profane Science and Business

Hawai’i is the latest battle ground between these forces.  On one side, the ancient folk traditions of the native Hawaiians:

The current unrest dates back to 2014, when construction on the telescope first began. A protest at the groundbreaking ceremony attracted the attention of celebrities such as the actor Jason Momoa, who is part Hawaiian. In 2015, construction was halted by the Hawaii governor, David Ige, following the arrest of 31 protesters. Then in 2018, the state’s supreme court ruled the construction legal, and Ige has said he supports building the telescope.

On Monday, as many as 500 protesters gathered at the base of the road leading up Mauna Kea in an attempt to block construction vehicles heading up the mountain to begin work. In the early morning hours while the sky was still dark, eight protesters dressed in winter clothes locked themselves to a cattle guard that crosses the road, preventing vehicles from moving past.

“Our goal is to protect Mauna Kea,” said Kahoʻokahi Kanuha, an organizer from the Hawaiʻi Unity and Liberation Institute (Huli), a group that opposes construction on Mauna Kea, who was reached by phone at the protest site. “What that means is that we do not allow the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope for that’s what would desecrate our mountain.”

The Native Hawaiian-led movement is fighting to protect spiritual and environmental aspects of the sacred mountain. Mauna Kea is associated with Wākea, the sky father, who partnered with Papa, the earth mother, to birth Native Hawaiians. The mountain is home to the endemic wēiku bug and Lake Waiau, an alpine lake that some Hawaiians visit to offer a newborn’s umbilical cord.

Kanuha mentions that Mauna Kea is on “crown lands”, which belonged to the Hawaiian kingdom before it was overthrown in 1893. Many Native Hawaiian organizations argue that these lands were stolen by the United States and still belong to the Hawaiian people. “These lands were taken from us, so we have rights to them,” he says “We have a spiritual connection to them. We have a genealogical connection to them.”

--Michelle Broder Van Dyke, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/18/hawaii-mauna-key-protest-arrests-observatory

On the other side, the forces of scientific and economic progress:

FINNERTY: In addition to the scientific benefits, many policymakers see the astronomy industry as an opportunity to diversify a local economy that is heavily dependent on tourism and agriculture, both of which suffered after last year's high-profile volcanic eruption. Miles Yoshioka is the executive officer of the Hawaii Island Chamber of Commerce. He says astronomy is a clean industry that provides good jobs for the community.

MILES YOSHIOKA: And we hope clear heads will prevail and realize that this is something that will help the next generations and build up an economy where we can have higher-paying jobs for our island.

FINNERTY: Yoshioka says Hawaii's astronomy industry already employs 1,600 people statewide and is responsible for $170 million in economic activity.

--Ryan Finnerty, https://www.npr.org/2019/07/19/743599260/hawaiian-activists-protest-construction-of-worlds-largest-telescope-in-state

The condescending tone toward an agricultural way of life is difficult to miss.

May the forces loyal to tradition win out, through the prayers of the Most Holy Mother of God, whose miraculous, myrrh-streaming Iveron Icon adorns and blesses the land of Hawai’i:

https://www.orthodoxhawaii.org/icons.html

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘The Frontier Is Essential for the American Project’

Key to the survival of the modern American project is never-ending motion, an eternal advance toward new horizons, new discoveries, greater progress.  If folks in the States ever had to settle down and be content with where they were and what they had, many of them would, to quote The X-Files’s Dana Scully, ‘lapse into catatonic schizophrenia’ (‘Home’, http://www.insidethex.co.uk/transcrp/scrp403.htm).

Thus, some new frontier, some new challenge, must always be laid before them to overcome.  Sacvan Bercovitch in The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis., U of Wisconsin Press, 1978) traces the development of this mindset.  In the early nineteenth century we find sentiments like this:

 . . . Politicians justified annexation and the Westward movement as part of America’s duty to “manifest to mankind the excellence of the divine principles of our Revolution”: “For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen” (p. 142).

 . . . Under Jefferson’s administration, and then Jackson’s, the expansion across Indian land proved beyond any doubt what all those terms implied – that America was not a territorial definition (except in the vague sense of “New World”), but the symbol of an ideological consensus.  “From the analogy of reason and providence,” as well as “from prophecy,” said Thomas Blockway in 1784, in a sermon commemorating the Revolution, “it is apparent that [the] . . . three thousand miles of Western territory” constitute the “stage on which [God means] to exhibit the great things of His Kingdom.”  Forty-two years later, Daniel Webster declared that the “principle” of the Revolution “adheres to the American soil.  It is bedded in it, immovable as the mountains.”  By 1856, Charles Dana could confidently announce that “the region which, commencing on the slope of the Alleghanies, broadens over the vast prairie” is “the Land of Promise, and the Canaan of our time”; if only the proper “New England minds” would direct the Westward migration – and if only they would keep “the enemies of our Revolution” from “making us a by-word and a scoff for mankind” – then the “wildest dreamer on the future of our race may one day see actualized a destiny far outreaching in splendor his most generous visions” (p. 161).

 . . . In “this chosen land,” ran the argument, God “has been for ages watching and preparing.  . . . The elements of a glorious order of civilization are now ready”; “we have increased beyond all previous calculations: we are surrounded by all comforts”; man’s “highest destiny” lies before us – “the untransacted destiny of the American people . . . to subdue the continent – to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean . . . to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point” – and this divine “right of manifest destiny to spread will not be admitted to exist in any nation except the universal Yankee nation.”  Implicit in all these statements . . . is the vision first expressed in God’s Promise to his Plantations:  “Others take the land by His providence, but God’s people take the land by promise” (p. 162).

 . . . “By promise,” they believed, the land belonged to them before they belonged to the land, and they took possession, accordingly, first by imposing their own image upon it, and then by seeing themselves reflected back in the image they had imposed.  The wilderness/garden became their mirror of prophecy.  They saw themselves revealed in it as the New Israel that would make the desert blossom as the rose.  They also discerned in it those who did not belong to the land:  Indians, heretics, opponents of the New England way, adherents to the ways of the Old World.  . . . Romanticism added the dimension of the sublime to wilderness and garden.  . . . American romantics looked to nature, as the New England Puritan had to Scripture, as a confirmation of the destiny of the New World.  What they saw there was the vast frontier, mirroring, come iri da iri, by the light of prophecy, “the universal Yankee nation.”

Their concept of the frontier is a measure of their debt to the Puritans.  Traditionally, frontier meant a border dividing one people from another.  In a sense, the Puritans recognized those differences – their “frontier” separated them from the Indian “outer darkness” – but they could hardly accept the restriction as permanent.  America was God’s Country, after all, and they were on a redemptive errand for mankind.  In effect, their motive for colonization entailed a decisive shift in the meaning of frontier, from a secular barrier to a mythical threshold.  Even as they spoke of their frontier as a meeting-ground between two civilizations, Christian and pagan, they redefined it, in a rhetorical inversion characteristic of the myth-making imagination, to mean a figural outpost, the outskirts of the advancing kingdom of God.  It became, in short, not a dividing line but a summons to territorial expansion.  And when after the Revolution the holy commonwealth spread westward across the continent, bringing light into darkness – or in one of Cotton Mather’s favorite phrases, “irradiating an Indian wilderness” – the frontier movement came to provide a sort of serial enactment of the ritual of the jeremiad.  It was the moving stage for the quintessentially American drams of destined progress, of process as order and control.  By the time of Jackson, the Puritan-Revolutionary inversion was standardized.  What in Europe signified history and restriction, came in America to signify prophecy and unlimited prospects.  This reading of frontier altered the Puritan concept, to be sure, from threat to promise; but in doing so it amplified (rather than changed) the old sense of errand.  In part at least, Jacksonians also regarded the frontier as a savage domain awaiting liberation, and they also invoked it, as we have seen, as a vehicle of the jeremiad: to create anxiety, to denounce backsliders, to reinforce social values, and (summarily) to define the American consensus.

This vision of the frontier had its chronometrical side in the American sublime.  The Puritans had sought correlations between their environment and Scripture; the Jacksonian romantics, expanding the outlook of the Revolutionary era, read the biblical promises in nature itself.  The Alleghenies, the prairies, the Hudson and Mississippi rivers became their Book of Revelation.  “Never before,” David Huntington has observed, “had the landscape painter known such urgency.  He had, for the first time in the world, been asked to paint the myth of human destiny,” to find an “iconology” through which the “spectator could slough off the Old World psyche and be spiritually reborn into the New World.”  And that new birth, be it noted, was not “Adamic” or “prelapsarian,” as our literary critics have told us, but (like the “National birth-day”) progressive and redemptive.  Its purpose was precisely to turn the nostalgia for paradise lost into a movement toward the future.  It was shaped not by Rousseau but by New England Puritanism (pgs. 162-5).

It is important to note before going on that this sort of thinking about the frontier is mainly a product of the New England soul, which embraces change and progress as virtues.  The Southerner by contrast has always been defined by adherence to sameness and tradition.  The latter ought to be as eager as any to throw off the Yankee ideology as something foreign to his way of life.

Withal, many from the Southern and Western States have gotten themselves bound up in the fast-paced Yankee lifestyle and have even entered the circles of the Elite alongside their Yankee cousins.  And it is here that we pick up the history of the idea of the frontier.  By the latter half of the 20^th century, the old New England Elite, having enriched themselves over the last hundred years or so by exploiting the peoples and lands beyond the frontier (i.e., the South and West), were ready to close the frontier, to cut off the ability for social advancement of the lower classes to the Elite circles.  But the New-Rich Elite from the South and West wanted to keep the frontier open and social mobility possible.  This conflict between Old and New Elite over the frontier, and its consequences for Americanism, is well-described by Carl Oglesby in his book The Yankee and Cowboy War (New York City, Berkley Publishing, 1976, https://ia800204.us.archive.org/8/items/OglesbyCarlTheYankeeAndCowboyWar/Oglesby,%20Carl%20-%20The%20Yankee%20and%20Cowboy%20War.pdf, via https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/george-herbert-walker-bush-3/).  Mr Oglesby says,

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/frontier-essential-american-project .

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!