When Dictators Fall, Who Rises?
One month before the invasion of Iraq, Riah Abu el-Assal, a Palestinian and the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem at the time, warned Tony Blair, "You will be responsible for emptying Iraq, the homeland of Abraham, of Christians."
The bishop proved a prophet. "After almost 2,000 years," writes the Financial Times, "Iraqi Christians now openly contemplate extinction. Some of their prelates even counsel flight."
The secular despot Saddam Hussein protected the Christians. But the U.S. liberation brought on their greatest calamity since the time of Christ. Scores of thousands of those Iraqi Christians fleeing terrorism and persecution after 2003 made their way to Syria, where they received sanctuary from President Bashar Assad.
Now, as the FT and Washington Post report, the Christians of Syria, whose forebears have lived there since the time of Christ, are facing a pogrom should the Damascus regime fall.
Christians are 10 percent of Syria's population, successful and closely allied to the minority Alawite regime of the Assad family. Said one Beirut observer, "Their fear is that if the regime falls to the Sunni majority, they will be put up against the same wall as the Alawites."
For decades, notes the Post, the Assad regime "has protected Christian interests by enforcing its strictly secular program and by curbing the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood."
Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, slaughtered perhaps 20,000 followers of the brotherhood after they began a campaign of bombings and terror and attempted an uprising in Hama in 1982. Hafez al-Assad rolled up his artillery and leveled the city.
Observing the toll of dead protesters—more than 100 this past weekend, more than 200 overall, the work of police, snipers and agents of the regime—it is hard to summon up any sympathy for Bashar Assad. And if his regime were to fall, that would eliminate a patron of Hamas and Hezbollah and a close ally of Iran in the Arab world.
But before he embraces the Syrian revolution, President Barack Obama ought to consider, as President George W. Bush did not, what happens to Arab Christians when a long-repressed Muslim majority comes to power.
In Iraq, liberated Shiites used their newfound freedom to cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis while al-Qaida arrived and went straight after the Christians. In Syria, it would be a Sunni majority rising if Bashar and the Alawites were to fall.
What would that mean for Syria's Christians, for peace, for us?
Since 1973, even when clashes have occurred and wars have been fought in Lebanon between Israelis and Syria or its proxies, the Assad government has maintained the truce on the Golan Heights.
Would a Sunni-dominated Syria do the same?
With the fall of the Mubarak regime in Egypt have come Islamist attacks on Coptic Christians. How will the Copts fare if the Muslim Brotherhood wins the September election and writes Shariah into Egyptian law?
In The Price of Revolution a half-century ago, D.W. Brogan inventoried the costs of the revolutions that so often intoxicate secular Western man.
The French Revolution led to regicide, the September Massacres, the Terror, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Catholics in the Vendee region of France, and almost two decades of Napoleonic wars.
The abdication of Czar Nicholas II led to the dictatorship of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, who would effect the murder of 1,000 times more victims than did the Spanish Inquisition in 300 years. And among the Bolshevik murder victims were the czar, his wife and his five children.
Fifteen years after the hated Kaiser, ruler of the Second Reich, abdicated, a proud veteran of his army, Adolf Hitler, established a Third Reich.
No altar-and-throne regime ever compiled a record of horror to match those of the French and Russian revolutions—or those of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Pol Pot.
When the Shah of Iran fell, within a year we had the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Americans have welcomed the "Arab Spring." Yet we should be forewarned that among those liberated when dictators fall is the sort of men that Edmund Burke described:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. ... Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Americans, who incarcerate 2.3 million of their own citizens, 90 percent of them males, are surely aware of the truth Burke spoke.
And across the Middle East, there are millions of "intemperate minds" that would use the freedom and power democracy provides to majorities to suppress or eradicate their long-hated rival minorities.
If one-man, one-vote democracy across the Maghreb and Middle East is almost certain to strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood and to liberate Islamists to persecute Christians, why are we for it?
When did this idol of modernity called democracy, in which none of our fathers believed, become a golden calf we all must fall down and worship?
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Mr. Sanjay, we're counting your beans. You are the one who started by comparing the U.S. incarceration rate with other countries. I merely suggested that you may be comparing apples with oranges.
"I did not mean to denigrate the Royal family..."
Certainly not more than they denigrated themselves and the sacred majesty of the throne by holding jazz and jitterbug dances afterwards. Reformationist 'kingship' was from the first weak as water. The bride is a commoner therefore the marriage annihilates the very distinction which it is the principle and necessity of monarchy to establish between the worthy and the uninitiated. Madame even presumed to choose (why did she have the choice?) the nuptial vows as to say "love and cherish" my husband rather than "love and obey". Such shrewish pride is highly blamable in a woman. The middle-class will love her as 'safe' and boring.
How differently were done our ceremonies of state! Mitre, dalmatica, chaplet and cope, censer, psalmody and holy-water intertwined with sceptre, sword, buckler and buskins, figures of lion, eagle and orb, the lavish gowns and heraldic arms of the peerage, in short the union of the emblems of the sacerdotal and military orders prefiguring the consummation of the Lord's Kingdom. These were the rich effusions of a rich soul: the magnificence and beauty necessary because great and powerful is our God. In the royal marriage rite was the exaltation of man, state and people into something prodigiously holy and irresistible.
I've been exceedingly fortunate to attend cathedral baptisms in Europe presided by episcopal clergy. What a scene to one's eyes! The golden-haired infant, out of the snowy white garments of Christian innocence, then purified by the hallowed waters, is held up by the bishop before the sacred altar of the Almighty saying, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts! We devote this boy to Thine Glory in the name of the Crucified Christ. Keep him always by Thy right side: spotless, faithful and true".
I appreciate Peter Arnold's articulation of thoughts that I hadn't quite had the energy to think through and articulate. My fellow royalist friends delighted in the marital festivities and I was a bit unnerved and put off by the whole thing. Just as the fuss over the funeral of John Paul II more closely resembled a Hollywood celebrity-worship frenzy than pious reverence, the attention given to the latest royal wedding seemed more akin to a soap opera fan convention than to a true point of national pride. I do believe that on balance the monarchy is a positive influence, that Britain would be worse off without them (just as I believe the Papacy remains and will continue to be the necessary supreme focal point for the Church on this Earth), but it is true that the more they succumb to the kind of tabloid flesh-fest depicted in that glorious film The Queen, the less they are able to serve their basic purpose of being a rallying point for the British people, reminding Britons who they are and where they come from.
Mr. Moses,
I was quite moved by John Paul II's funeral and what preceded it.
Fr. Zuhlsdorf said it quite well this morning: http://wdtprs.com/blog/2011/04/fr-z-in-wapo-on-john-paul-iis-beatification/
This is a brief note to reassure Mr. Nicoletti that my forthcoming book about Mr. Buchanan is not going to be a hit-job! It was in fact rejected by several publishers for being "too balanced". And that's just what it is - balanced.
My politics are eclectic and I'm not American, so I probably wouldn't comfortably fit into any box. But I will say that I agree with everything Mr. Buchanan has written in the above article.
Keep reading Chronicles! It's quite wonderful.
t
NGPM,
OK. Got a little chewing done.
"Perverse", good word. I long ago came to the conclusion that incarceration was a poor use of time and money, but that word brings home the relationship between the practice and the ideology which spawned it. Just scanning some of Bentham's work shows that the penitentiary concept indeed sprang from bad seed. It comes out of the idea that men are perfectible, or at least that, through reason as handed down in the guidance of enlightened masters, they can continually be improved, which is of course one of the rottenest fruits of the French Revolution and 19th century liberalism. (What other historical precursors it may have are beyond my present state of education.)
But jail is all we have for now, and I stand by my statement that more people, not less, need to be off our streets. And I don't see how a Christian in good conscience can advocate death, for, say, an habitual thief or armed robber; while on the other hand, putting them up at the crossbar hotel for awhile will certainly protect people from their depradations. And when they get out, perhaps more hardened and skilled in their criminal ways, the answer is more police. Take a look at any city street and what do you see? Great gaping holes in police protection just waiting for a crim to exploit. If our politicians could be made to consider the welfare of their people for a change, instead of building their grandiose "cultural" and governmental centers, a large increase in police forces, with stipulations that a large percentage of the new manpower be 1.) men; and 2.) dedicated to foot patrols, would be one of the best things they could do.
Regarding women: we have this argument every time some criticism of women surfaces. It reminds me of the chicken and egg argument, only modified to read: "Which came first, bad men, or bad women?" I'll concede a point against the men as far as that the same lack of masculine virtue in modern men which has resulted in "an inability to morally and materially protect women so that they, in turn, can fulfill their role as moral and material nurturers of men." (and the role of royalty, as well) is responsible for the essentially cowardly imprisonment regime: too squeamish to inflict corporal pain, men now just wash their hands of miscreants.
Robert,
The Repo Chick: she's the lesbian lover of the new-breed housekeeper, right - the one who marries you, divorces you, and keeps your house?
@Mr. Piatak: I don't mean to start a debate on the merits or faults of John Paul II. I stand my ground that, regardless of how venerable he may be, the cult that has grown up around this veneration is bothersome. To illustrate this, let us consider Our Lady of Lourdes. That is an incredible apparition whose pilgrimage has been completely ruined by hideous mosaics in an otherwise modestly sightly Basilica atop a truly ugly crypt, an overstock of nauseating and overpriced plastic representations of Our Lord and His mother, a slew of tawdry hotels and, worst of all, a flood of high-living tourists calling themselves pilgrims. Saint Bernadette, who moved away from Lourdes to maintain a modest and humble profile (as well as to continue living in poverty) amidst a growing, worldwide interest in her, must surely be appalled. By far Lourdes was the most disappointing and least fulfilling pilgrimage I have ever taken--and after reading a wonderful book detailing the story (a beautifully illustrated tome published within the lifetime of Saint Bernadette) and buying myself a lovely bronze statue of Our Lady, I had been so motivated to go and see the grotto and drink the water! (Naturally the water was the one good thing I brought back.)
Back to John Paul II. The point is not whether John Paul II is venerable or not. But I really believe the cult rising up around his veneration has an air of a sort of sycophantic obsession that I have rarely seen in any cult of any other Saint. I do not think at any time in history have such a huge proportion of people been so enamored of a deceased Pope. I do not think it was a reflection of Catholic piety, I do not believe a Pope truly needs to be so visible as a movie star, even in the modern world, and I am ready to say that most people I know who venerate John Paul II could not give a particularly deep reason for this veneration apart from his gentle pious example. I anticipate the response: we'd rather people be enamored of a Pope than of a movie star, but this rush to beatification seems to underlie an air of desperation, a need for the Church to proclaim officially and definitively that the late Pope lives on above us.
@Mr. Jacobi: it was Dr. Fleming who first clued me in on the Benthamian nature of prisons: "penitentiaries." Forcing someone to do penance? Yes, "perverse" is a most excellent word, for only a pervert such as Bentham could have conceived of such an idea. (Dr. Fleming amusingly but accurately referred to the Quakers as "moral perverts" in the context of his argument.)
Regarding specifics, though, I'm not advocating capital punishment for every major crime. Public floggings could suffice for many of them. However, there might be a case to be made for executing an armed robber with a high rate of recidivism, particularly if there is ample evidence that the person has a truly criminal personality (the politically correct term, controversial among more straight-thinking psychiatrists, is "anti-social personality disorder"; most empirical evidence suggests that this cannot be treated and can be managed with great difficulty).
Your point about prisons as a provisional solution despite their problematic nature is well-taken and a very close and like-minded friend has made exactly the same point to me, but I remain highly wary of such a solution. My reason is this: the way things have been going the last few decades, how can we be sure the Powers That Be will not quickly employ those police and those prisons to incarcerate political opponents and religious conservatives for "hate crimes"?
Re: women, we could go on forever debating the specifics. We all know that humans have a sinful nature regardless of sex. However, I can honestly say that I have rarely or never seen a truly disgusting women that did not have a serious problem with most or all of the men who had influenced her in her upbringing, and I have rarely or never met a straight-laced woman who grew up without significant positive masculine influence.
Just my $200.00 (they're really chipping away at the value of the dollar, as you are aware--hence the 999 900 % markup on a few hastily prepared remarks).
Interesting comments about JPII. Canonizations of Popes, at least so many within the last 150 years of Pontiffs, sets an awful prescient. Every Pope now has a canonization cause going back to Pius XII. Its almost as though canonization is now some kind of modern seal of approval, the new default standard.
I tend to agree, actually, Mr. Maxwell, as historically saints were not canonized until many years after their deaths. One very good thing about that lengthy process was that it avoided legitimizing a personality cult that will not outlast the memory of persons who were alive when the candidate was alive. The more she canonizes, the more the Church looks like a California country club: it is difficult to take seriously an organization that appears to be concerned with nothing but cocktail party self-congratulation.
@61.
All true. And here is the reason that such is pushed through: the silly and self-deluding (if not necessarily heretical and akin to Gnosticm's sense of history) faith in a New Springtime/2nd Pentecost that would flower like Woodstock after Vatican II.
If you have created the 2nd Pentecost, then you must have endless saints and super heroes of the faith, specifically those who were most responsible for giving us the New Springtime, but also representatives of various groups of people who are specially adored in this zeitgeist.
The 'Spirit of Vatican II' is as much suicidal liberal spiritual/intellectual coprophagy as can be birthed within historic Christianity (and sola fide is not historic Christianity) short of total apostasy, such as by ordaining women and marrying homosexuals and declaring abortion a right and declaring all religions valid paths.
And that last gets us to thinking about media-beloved JP2's antics in Assisi and with Rabbis and Korans that he felt compelled to kiss.