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  • The Chinese Go After Steven Spielberg

    The Chinese have their own point of view about Steven Spielberg’s pullout of the Olympics:

    "This person is completely living in his sci-fi world and cannot distinguish dream from reality," said a commentator in the China Youth Daily.

    The official Xinhua news agency said Chinese people were baffled by the behaviour of the man behind blockbusters like E.T., Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List.

    "Mr Spielberg knows nothing about China’s endeavour to solve the Darfur issue," Xinhua quoted a commentary in the Guangming Daily as saying. "He is unqualified to blame the Chinese government."

    Thousands of angry Chinese ganged up against him on Internet forums, according to the news agency.

    They targeted Spielberg "as a person who failed to keep his word" and for linking politics to the Beijing Olympics.

    One posting said: "The US slaughters civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. Director Spielberg, don’t you feel ashamed being an American?

    "You don’t criticise your own country, then how can you criticise China?"

    I got a similar reaction to a piece I posted on the Chinese author Mao Dun some time back:

    American journalists tend to look at things from their own angle. They have a self-defined notion of correctness or ultimate truth, and
    if people do not agree with that, then there is a problem. This is very sad. They do not try to understand the path of other people’s
    development, neither do they respect others’ ideals, or if they do, they bluntly ignore it. They describe everything they disagree as
    “undemocratic”, “insincere” or “fake.”

    Disagreement is too common and it is good that people are open about it. But I think it is a disgrace of turn a disagreement into character bashing. This is what the journalist did here. But nonetheless, it was good information that he revealed.

  • Those Inconvenient Serbs

    Kosovo’s declaration of independence makes me think of Spengler’s article on the subject from about a year ago:

    If Serbia and Russia draw a line in the sand over the independence of Kosovo, we may observe the second occasion in history when a Muslim advance on Europe halted on Serbian soil. The first occurred in 1456, three years after the fall of Constantinople, when Sultan Mehmed II was thrown back from the walls of Belgrade, "The White City", by Hungarian and Serb defenders. The Siege of Belgrade "decided the fate of Christendom", wrote the then Pope Calixtus III. Not for nothing did J R R Tolkien name his fictional stronghold of Minas Tirith "The White City".

    While America’s attention is riveted on Iraq, Russia is outraged at the American-backed plan for Kosovo’s independence, proposed by UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari. Kosovo comprised the historic Serbian heartland, Christian Serbs comprise less than a tenth of the present population. Perhaps 200,000 Serbs have left the province since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made Kosovo a protectorate in 2000.

    The Bill Clinton administration, in this writer’s considered view, provoked NATO’s 1999 bombing war against Serbia with malice of forethought, as a gesture to the Muslim world. The United States in effect was willing to bomb Christians in order to protect Muslims, in this case the Albanian Kosovo majority whom it accused the Serbs of mistreating. That is precisely what the Democrats say. In a January 3 article in the Financial Times, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden contended that Kosovo independence would constitute a "victory for Muslim democracy", and "a much-need example of US-Muslim partnership".

    Contrary to American propaganda at the time, no massacres had occurred; the Serbs had shot a few thousand Muslim militants in their efforts to pacify the province. Clinton, then secretary of state Madeleine Albright and UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke deluded themselves that they could cash in the chips earned in Kosovo at the negotiating table in the Middle East. The neo-conservatives cheered the Clinton bombing campaign, believing perhaps that any American show of force was better than no show of force.

    Once again Washington’s attention is directed toward the Middle East. Washington proposes to sacrifice the remaining Christians in Kosovo in order to earn Muslim support. Serbia has earned little sympathy; its brutality against Bosnian Muslims during the 1990s left an image of Serbian barbarity etched on the mind of the Western public.

    Without apologizing for past Serbian misbehavior, I believe that Serbia and Russia are correct to offer partition rather than independence for Kosovo, that is, breaking off the Christian-majority municipalities of the north and attaching them to Serbia proper, while permitting the Muslim majority to determine its own fate.

    This is the obvious, humane and commonsense solution; the fact that the State Department refuses to consider it inflames Russia’s worst fears about America’s intent. To broad Russian opinion, the sacrifice of the Kosovo Serbs seems like yet another prospective humiliation, on top of the deployment of anti-missile systems on Russia’s border and the buildup of American forces in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

    Bill Clinton’s war may come back to haunt us yet.  (And, don’t forget, we bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade to boot, so we may have an additional SCO opponent at the UN.)

  • Book Review: Why Men Hate Going to Church

    I’ve spent some time on this blog talking about the present crisis Evangelical Christianity faces in the U.S., and what might be done about it.  There are a lot of explanations of why this is so, but one of the most intriguing comes from David Murrow.  In his book Why Men Hate Going to Church, he puts his finger on a very important problem: with a 2:1 ratio of women to men, there is something about Christianity in this country that repels men.  And, as is well documented, men are central in the transmission of the faith both to their contemporaries and to the next generation.

    I come from a long line of men who hated church.  They’d sooner be just about anywhere else–work, the bar, the Lodge, the country club, the yacht, the airplane, you name it–than in church.  My decision to be a Christian in more than name only never sat well with many of my relatives.  So I find any attempt for a reasonable explanation–if not necessarily a pleasant one–intriguing.

    Murrow’s basic premise is that Christianity in general, in spite of a predominantly male clergy, is largely feminised, and as a result unattractive to men.  His book breaks itself down into six parts:

    1. Why Men Hate Going to Church (an overview;)
    2. The Three Gender Gaps, or aspects of church life where the approach generally taken appeals more to women than to men;
    3. Understanding Men and Masculinity;
    4. The Straws That Break Men’s Hearts, the “little” things that repel men and cumulatively run them out of church;
    5. Restoring the Masculine Spirit in the Church, ways of changing the program of the church to make it more amenable to men; and
    6. Meeting Men’s Deepest Needs, addressing men in a more profound way.

    While I find Murrow’s basic idea to be correct, there’s something about this book and books like it (John Eldridge’s Wild at Heart is another) that always seem to miss something.  That something is real historical perspective, which would facilitate breaking out of the present mould by suggesting that things haven’t always been the way they are now and don’t need to be that way in the future.  (Such a perspective also suggests that cultural issues are involved too.)  Let me make some observations to illustrate this:

    1. Murrow tends to romanticise the “early” church, a universal fault with Evangelical writers.  Contrary to Murrow’s characterisation of an explosion of unadulturated, apostolic and masculine energy, the New Testament and subsequent history actually show that Christianity was less and less feminised as time went by, with movements such as Montanism unsuccessfully bucking the tide (and that defeminised by the very masculine Tertulllian.)  Roman Empire Christianity moved in a very masculine civilisation with some very “unmasculine” characteristics, at least as far as Murrow is concerned.  For example, civic life lived and died on verbal, rhetorical skills, something men are supposed to be desperately short of.  (We see some of this in the New Testament.)  The elaborate theology and doctrine of Christianity was developed by the Church Fathers, not the Church Mothers, which is amazing in view of Murrow’s view of women and Bible studies.
    2. Murrow’s statement that “Men are rarely motivated by guilt, duty or obligation” (p. 20) is simply wrong.  Back in World War I, an entire generation of Britons and Frenchmen were motivated by just that to endure four years of the most horrible war ever fought.  The compulsion of duty in the performance of great tasks imbues The Lord of the Rings, written by J.R.R. Tolkien, possibly the best known “Great War” veteran to have ever lived.  What Murrow has missed is that modernity–which had a far greater impact on the Germans in the opposing trenches–has radically altered men’s expectations of what they can get out of life, and that’s a lot of what the church is struggling with.
    3. Reading Murrow is a reminder of the enormous impact that Scotch-Irish emotionalism and primitivism has had on the American psyche and especially our culture’s traditional view of masculinity.  It’s worth remembering, though, that these Celtic worthies are the descendants of people who were brilliant enough to put roller bearings in their carts but never bothered to use an alphabet until the Romans showed up.  (That explains a lot of the lack of literacy and anti-intellectualism of American life.)  An urbanised culture like ours begs for different outlets of masculinity.  Why have most musical composers been male?  Or engineers and scientists?  Or professional chefs?  I know that Murrow is trying to focus on men as they are, but as I write I know of one guy that’s out there cooking for relief workers cleaning up after the recent spate of tornadoes.  The subject of the Scotch-Irish may also illuminate why the South continues to be the centre of American Christianity, feminised church and all.  There’s enough historical memory down here of what happens when testosterone-fuelled hotheads dominate the discussion.  Remember Pickett’s Charge?  That led to Appomattox.
    4. Murrow may not be getting the whole picture on why feminisation is a threat to churches in Latin America.  My contact with men’s ministries leadership in Mexico leads me to believe that one reason why pastors are gun-shy about starting men’s ministries is because they fear the men will stage a coup and take the church over.  I’ve heard the same sentiment on this side of the Rio Grande as well.  Evangelical authors tend to avoid the whole subject of power holder/power challenger relationships in church, but they’re there, and their impact on keeping men (who are perceived as hard to control) out of churches needs to be addressed.
    5. He asks the question, “Why are Christians going on retreats?  What kind of army is always retreating?  Why don’t we advance every now and then?” (p. 138)  The Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International answered that question a long time ago by calling its gatherings in remote places advances.

    In spite of these limitations, Murrow’s book is a good one.  It ‘s challenging in many ways, both to churches in general and for those of us who are involved in men’s ministries.  Why Men Hate Going to Church is an essential read for anyone who is serious about getting at the deepest difficulties of church in this country and what needs to be done to right them.

    Finally: if Murrow thinks that a lot of recent praise and worship music has too strong of a feminine take on one’s relationship with God, he should check out last week’s podcast!

    ,

  • The Democrats are Still Impaled on Dzerzhinskii’s Dilemma

    The fracas between Bush and Congress over pending national security legislation brings back some thoughts from the last election cycle:

    …we must first realise that the Democrat party today is the party of the 60’s radical. That includes just about every major player in the party. At the heart of sixties radicalism is rebellion against authority, especially the military and the police. When they’re not worried about what authority can do to them at the present, they worry what it might do to them in the future. That’s why the ACLU constantly attempts to undermine anti-terror efforts by the government.

    As a practical matter, one would think that they would realise that, if they ever did gain power, the police and military would be essential elements in their ability to maintain it. And sometimes they do know this; the Clintons have never been shy about using the power of law to protect them personally and to advance their own proper interests. But in general the Democrats are reflexively unable to empower the military and police to protect us out of a fear they will repress us, even in the face of Islamicists who would wipe out their way of life more surely than anything else.

    To draw a contrast, consider another revolution, namely the Russian. Lenin had no illusions about what he was aiming for: the dictatorship of the proletariat. Left-wing communism was an “infantile disorder,” to be set aside for the good of the cause. Moreover Lenin didn’t have the luxury of a legal system such as ours: he had armed resistance to his revolution, and so, although a major objective was to get out of World War I (which he did through capitulation,) he had no qualms about forming a military and brutally defeating his “White” enemies.

    His handling of police matters was no different; he had the Pole Feliks Dzerzhinskii to head up the NKVD, which became the KGB, to take care of internal dissidents through imprisonment and execution. His strategy worked; by the time he died the Communist Party was in control of what became the Soviet Union and would remain so for the next sixty-five years.

    Unfortunately the security apparatus that he had set up turned on many of its creators. Under Stalin, many of Lenin’s comrades (Leon Trotsky being the most famous) ended up perishing in the purges, and the likes of Lysenko took centre stage. This is a historical memory not even the left can shake; it is one more reason why the flower children that dominate the Democrat party have an aversion to strenghtening the military and intelligence apparatus of the government. They know better than anyone that, in a modern society, today’s norms are tomorrow’s crimes.

    So the Democrats are stuck. They simply cannot bring themselves to allow our military and intelligence services to do what they have to do. So the vote to keep them weak in the face of public opinion to the contrary. The Democrat Party and the American left is trapped in Dzershinskii’s Dilemma, where if they neglect national security we lose and if they beef it up they get wiped out. They never will find a way out. We vote for such people at our own peril.

    This may also explain why there is such a stampede towards Obama.  Those in the know are well aware that the Clintons would use any Bush-era security enhancement to their own personal empowerment.  Perhaps they think that Obama wouldn’t be as agressive in using such means.  I’m inclined to agree with this, but the ability of America’s enemies to create chaos would be greatly enhanced by the victory of the party impaled on Dzershinskii’s Dilemma.

  • The High Price of Rowan Williams’ Shar’ia Remarks

    In all of the furor over Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ remarks on Shar’ia law in the UK, one backwash many people in the West forget is the impact it will have on Christian-Muslim relations in places such as Nigeria.  As David Virtue points out in his most recent newsletter:

    Most British pundits viewed Williams’ words from within the context of the CofE, failing to see the impact of his words on the Global South. People are going to die in northern Nigeria for what Williams has said. He has no concept of the impact of his words. Public statements have public consequences. Just ask Archbishop Ben Kwashi of Jos what will happen in the next few months. With a foot in the British legal system, Muslims will demand more. That is exactly what has happened in Nigeria and that is why Williams’ words are dangerous, stupid and threatening. Williams hasn’t figured out that you can’t make statements as though you were an academic making chatter at high table at Oxford or Cambridge or writing articles for obscure journals read only by fellow scholars. He is not. He is the leader of 55 million Anglicans worldwide. What he says affects us all. It is VOL’s view that his words will come back to haunt him and us.

    One thing it has done is to cement the view that GAFCON organizers have it right. Their distrust of Williams has been reinforced. They will say, with greater urgency and more loudly, that orthodox Anglicans don’t need to go through Canterbury to get to Jesus. GAFCON will draw a minority of bishops, but they will represent a majority of the Anglican Communion, as much as 75% or more thus, in effect, kissing off Lambeth and saying, without exactly saying it, that the Anglican Communion as we now know it is no more.

    Archbishop Kwashi’s thoughts on the subject are here.

    The Africans’ rejection of TEC’s sexual agenda (along with a lot of other things) isn’t just about power, as many on the left are wont to think.  It’s about survival.  Given all of the choice between the pastiche that comes with being part of the Anglican Communion and survival at the hands of angry Muslims, it’s not a difficult choice.  Looked at another way, if you’re going to die for the faith, die for the faith, not some concoction dreamed up by liberals with more money than brains.

  • A Christian Carole King?

    This week’s podcast is Never Be Alone Again, performed by the Outpouring, the group of the Community of the Cross in Danbury, CT.  This is an extraordinary piece; not only does its lead female vocalist, Fran Novelli, sound a lot like Carole King, but its expression of longing for God is almost mystical.  (Some explanation of this can be found in the album cover notes.)

    The rest of this great album is found at The Ancient Star-Song.

  • Scientology: Has The Bologna Club Met Its Match?

    One of the toughest nuts to crack in our civilisation (or what passes for one) has been Scientology, which has succeeded in bullying many of its critics into silent oblivion.  (I refer to this crew as the "Bologna Club," a term going back to the 1930’s and referring to a time when my family and L. Ron Hubbard crossed paths.)

    Now it seems that Tom Cruise’s ebullient video about Scientology’s benefits has created a backlash in enturbulation.org, which is organising protests against the Church of Scientology.  They make a clear distinction between the religion and the church as follows:

    We are not against Scientology.

    Scientology, like all religions, is a belief system, a way of perceiving and decoding the world around us. We believe in the basic, inalienable right to a personal religious creed. A man, or woman, can believe whatever he or she chooses to believe; it is their prerogative, and they should never be attacked, persecuted or discriminated for it…

    We are against the Church of Scientology.

    The CoS is harmful to society, and to its own members. Its institutional purpose is, as stated by its founder, its own prevalence and expansion, mainly in an economic way. It considers the religion, the belief, the faith to be not an end, as it should, but a means, a mere tool. Indeed, it is degrading towards its own religious base and all those who believe in it.

    I’m not sure that such a distinction can be made in the case of Scientology; it seems to me to be an institutional religion.  But I wish the enturbulators well; they’re taking on a tough bunch, and in a world that runs from controversy, you have to give them their due.

  • The Tyranny of “Doing Right”

    It took Jack Crooks of Black Swan Trading to point out this quote from C.S. Lewis:

    “Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

    Or, to put it another way:

    There are endless laws. Everybody is guilty of something. And, being Anglo-Saxons, they have the idea that all of these laws should be enforced.  The only reason you are here rather than sitting in jail is because it would call even more attention to this affair. Everybody is a criminal, everybody is a suspect, because it is impossible to live there and not violate the law. It would be great if one person could come along and take the punishment for everybody. That, in a celestial sense, is what Jesus Christ did for us. He came into a world where everyone was guilty and gave them the chance to be innocent. (The left-wingers) came into an innocent world and gave everybody a chance to be guilty.

    The Frenchman Pierre des Cieux in the novel Two Paths.

  • LORAN: An Old Method Gets New Life

    I was a little surprised to discover that our government has opted to fund LORAN for a little longer.  LORAN, or LOng RAnge Navigation, is a system whereby ships, airplanes or other travelling vehicles or people determine their position by comparing the time difference in receipt of radio signals from multiple sources.  It has been in use for many years; however, GPS has very much displaced LORAN for most navigation, as anyone with OnStar or an iPhone knows.


    Above: 1966 chart of South Florida and the northern Bahamas, showing the LORAN grid (the curved green and magenta lines) which navigators could use with the radio signals they received to determine their position.

    It’s tempting to dismiss this as another waste of taxpayer’s money, but accurate knowledge of one’s position is critical at sea and in the air.  As the Coast Guard’s Loran-C Handbook reminds us:

    Navigators are cautioned never to place total reliance on any single aid to navigation. Because no system is reliable 100% of the time, navigators should use all available navigation information, and be knowledgeable with the capabilities and limitations of each.

    GPS, for example, can be taken out of service in time of war, to say nothing of hackers bringing it down.

    My father spent much of his World War II service in the Pacific putting up LORAN stations, which proves Coasties’ contention that their job is to bail the Navy out when it gets lost (or to prevent it.)  Ironically we never used it when yachting in the Bahamas; perhaps it would have come in handy in disasters like this and storms as well.

  • The French Will Fight for Their Freedom

    Recently I attended a conference on men’s ministries put on by Man in the Mirror, and had the privilege of being there with a very diverse group of people.  Part of that group included two Englishmen from East London, where they’re building the largest mosque in Europe for the 2012 Olympic Village.  (No, they didn’t want to discuss the 2012 Olympic logo!)

    But our conversation turned to other issues, and one of them was the ubiquitous "security" cameras in the UK.  They’re truly everywhere, and I’ve lamented this issue before.  One of the Englishmen noted that one reason the US is "behind" with cameras is that Americans will vigourously oppose them, even intersection cameras.  The British were just too passive to fight the intrusion into their lives and their freedom.  And he added the French to the list of those who would fight against things like this.

    The French?  Of course!  They have a long history of opposing government action about things they don’t like, including industrial actions such as strikes by truck/lorry drivers.  They even stopped the government from nationalising large portions of the Catholic school system: in 1984, two million people demonstrated in Paris against this, which forced the government to bury the idea.  And this in the home of läicité!  (I hope my countrymen will have the guts to do the same thing when the next administration tries it!)  And France has home schooling as well. which is more than I can say for the Germans.

    Francophone countries have a logic of their own, one which people in Anglo-Saxon countries would do well to examine before making ridiculous statements about them.

    I should also add that same Englishman who explained this to me is, like me, a fan of The Prisoner.  Be seeing you!

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