The Grand Order of the Aleph Zadik Aleph (AZA or אצא), an international fraternity for Jewish teenagers, was founded in Omaha, Nebraska.
It would go on to found the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization a year later.
The SS Catalina, which would be in service for 51 years ferrying passengers between Los Angeles and Santa Catalina Island, was launched.
German police raided the Soviet Trade Delegation
Zinaida Kokorina, against the odds and through the intervention of the Soviet head of state, became the first female military pilot on this day in 1924.
She wanted to become a fighter pilot, but was persuaded to remain a flight instructor, which she did through World War Two. She later became headmistress of a village school at Cholpon-Ata in Kyrgyzstan before retiring to Moscow.
I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that’s what I want! I know I can write, […] but it remains to be seen whether I really have talent. And if I don’t have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can’t imagine living like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! […] I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me! When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?
The Diary of Anne Frank, April 5, 1944.
She achieved her goal, and triumphed over her oppressors.
Y’hei sh’lama raba min sh’maya, v’hayim, aleinu v’al koi yisrael, v’imru amen.
Oseh shalom bi-m’romav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol yisrael, v’imru amen.
Magnified and sanctified is the great name of God throughout the world, which was created according to Divine will. May the rule of peace be established speedily in our time, unto us and unto the entire household of Israel. And let us say: Amen.
May God’s great name be praised throughout all eternity. Glorified and celebrated, lauded and praised, acclaimed and honored, extolled and exalted ever be the name of thy Holy One, far beyond all song and psalm, beyond all hymns of glory which mortals can offer. And let us say: Amen.
May there be abundant peace from heaven, with life’s goodness for us and for all thy people Israel. And let us say: Amen.
May the One who brings peace to the universe bring peace to us and to all the people Israel. And let us say: Amen.
And;
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Amen.
On the same day, Hungarian authorities, now leaning into Nazism as it collapsed, ordered Hungarian Jews to wear a yellow Star of David.
The Marines occupied Utirik Atoll in the Marshalls, another of the numerous islands taken and occupied which we have forgotten.
A soldier who has been a long time in the line does have a 'look' in his eyes that anyone with practice can discern. It's a look of dullness, eyes that look without seeing, eyes that see without transferring any response to the mind. It's a look that is the display room for the thoughts that lie behind it---------¬exhaustion, lack of sleep, tension for too long, weariness that is too great, fear beyond fear, misery to the point of numbness, a look of surpassing indifference to anything anybody can do to you. It's a look I dread to see on men.
Ernie Pyle, April 5, 1944.
The Red Army cut the rail line from Odessa at Rozdilna.
Ploesti, Romania, is attacked by B-17s and B-24s. Only 12 bombers are lost in spite of heavy German, Romanian and Bulgarian fighter opposition and flak.
Wendell Willkie, a democratic until 1939, withdrew from the 1944 GOP Presidential contest.
Young woman weeps during the deportation of Jews from Ioannina, Greece - March 25, 1944. Budesarchive on Wikipedia. 87% of Greek Jews perished in the Holocaust. 91% of those from Ioannina, the oldest and ancient Greek Jewish settlement, would die at Auschwitz.
Adolf Hitler ordered the execution of recaptured POWS who were part of the mass escape from Stalag Luft III. While his order would mostly be carried out, it would not entirely.
Germany was, of course, inescapably going down in defeat. As it was, it was covering itself in gore.
The Battle of the Kaments-Podolsky Pocket began as the Red Army attempted to surround the 1st Panzer Army South at Tarnopol.
U.S. forces eliminate most of the remaining Japanese forces on Manus.
In the Caroline Islands, Japanese patrols sight large American naval forces heading for Palau.
I should note, if you look at the items linked in on this site, over on the right, in the general interest category, there are things from the right and the left. If you only looked at some of my posts, you would assume that I'm a flaming liberal, maybe even a progressive. If you look at others, you'd assume I'm a conservative (you wouldn't assume I'm a populist, and I'm not). That probably means that I'm something else entirely, and indeed my views span right and left.
A full reader of this blog would know that I'm a Catholic, however.
One thing that I think is obvious to serious observant Catholics, and likely observant Orthodox, is that this is a Protestant Country. It really is. That's different from a "Christian Country". It's Protestant. Even people who like to spout off that this country doesn't have a religious founding of some sort are, actually, some sort of cultural Protestant, by and large. It's pretty obvious if you are a dedicated member of one of the minority religions, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, etc. As Protestants live in a Protestant culture, they don't realize that the culture is Protestant. Indeed, one of the charming things about Americans in general is the belief that everyone all over the globe thinks just like we do.
To take it a step further, quite a few sort of adherent members of other faiths, or maybe just not really well-informed members of other faiths, are heavily Protestantized. So you'll find Catholics that have heavily Protestant views, for example.
The deeply Protestant culture of the country impacts almost everything about it, from our economics to our foreign policy. It may not be at all evident to average people, but an example of that can be found in the country's overall reaction to the two major ongoing wars being fought right now.
I've supported, as people here would note, the Israeli war against Hamas, which Hamas started. But to be brutally honest, a lot of American support for Israel comes from two sources. One is the country's Jewish population, which is actually quite small, but which has been historically influential since some point in the mid 20th Century. The other is due to Evangelical Christians who see the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 as a fulfillment of a promise in the book of Revelation, although they aren't the only Christian's, or perhaps individual Christians, to see that, that way. Evangelical Christians, however, tend to see Israel in absolutist terms and many see supporting Israel as a way to directly bring about the Second Coming. For its part, the Israeli government, which actually tends to be highly secular, has worked that pretty heavily over the years.
Catholics and the Orthodox have a much more nuanced view of this topic, however, as their relationship with the region goes all the way back. Apostolic Christians were present in the region since day one. Early on, Apostolic Christianity won many converts of the Jews in the region, but also of Arabs and other regional populations. Christianity, and by that we mean Apostolic Christianity, largely converted the entire region before the Arab conquests of the 5th and 6th Century brought in Islam, but even then huge populations of Christians, and again we mean Apostolic Christians, as that is all that there were, remained. What Protestants, not Apostolic Christians, termed the Crusade when they began to falsify history came about originally to try to protect the pilgrimage routes to the very region that is now being fought over. At least up until fairly recently, 10% of the Palestinian population remained Catholic, and to the north, Lebanon was, up until fairly recently, predominately so. Large populations of Orthodox Christians were also to be found. Israel, in its relationship with out of the region Christians, however, reaches out mostly to Evangelical Christians who are pretty much completely foreign to the region.
The English Colonies were of course colonized by residents of Great Britain, who were, at the time they began to do that, Protestants. They were not all members of the Church of England or the Church of Scotland, however, and that very much has its ongoing impact today. Dissenters from the Protestant state churches, such as the "Pilgrims", took refuge in North America from whichever Protestant church was in control at the time, which was usually the Anglican Church in England, and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland in Scotland. Immigrants from minority Protestant faiths didn't tend to have a concept of extending religious liberty in the New World, but rather escaping oppression for their minority views in the Old. Once in North America, they tended to be just as intolerant as the established churches they had escaped from. The one thing they could all agree on, however, is that they hated Catholics.
That was in large part because the English Protestant churches of all types had to rely on myths to justify their existence. The Church of England hadn't even really intended to separate long from the Catholic Church at first, but once things got rolling, it was hard to go back. This was for a variety of reasons, and to at least some degree the Church of England remains uncomfortable with its separation. It's made several attempts towards reversing it, and some significant sections of it basically pretend it didn't occur to a certain degree. But an early feature of it was an attempt to justify what it had done, which it never really came up with a good thesis for. Part of that simply devolved to creating a mythical history of Medieval Catholicism, a different approach than that taken by the norther European principalities that followed Luther, who also didn't mean to really separate at first.
Over time, the mythical history of the Medieval Church that the English created passed away in the UK itself. Brave Catholic remnants hung on, and the fact that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom always meant that the fables had objections to them. But in the English colonial experiments in North America, this was largely untrue. Immigrants to the colonies were overwhelmingly Protestant, if in some areas not overwhelmingly Anglican. Fables developed during the Reformation were carried over and instituted into the telling of American history and into American culture, which is why even now students at higher levels will hear stories of bloody Inquisitions and naked aggression in the Middle East that are simply untrue.
Part of the fable is that the country has always been supportive of "freedom of religion" and even that this is enshrined in the Constitution. It isn't, and it hasn't been.
At the time of the Revolution, almost all American colonist were Protestants. Certainly exceptions existed, but Catholics were a distinct minority and members of other religions, such as Judaism, were nearly non-existent. A significant exception had been Africans brought over as slaves prior to the 1700s, but during the 1700s they largely converted to Protestant faiths, reflecting the religion of where they were held, although often not the same varieties, exactly, of Protestantism of those who held them in bondage. Certainly slaves when first brought over, which was still occurring at the time of the Revolution irrespective of its illegality, were members of African animist religions by and large. About 1/3d were Muslim, however, and a few were Catholic. In terms of cultural myth, this is interesting in that it's commonly forgotten that most African slaves were animists at the time of their enslavement and also that the common excuse at the time that they would be introduced to Christianity actually wasn't true for all of them, some already being Christians. Be all of that as it may, the legacy of pre enslavement religions dissipated relatively rapidly, although some remnant of it remains even today in terms of folk beliefs.1
In 1776 when the nation rebelled against its Anglican monarch, King George III, most of the rebellious leaders in the Continental Congress were solidly Protestant. Indeed, one of the Intolerable Acts they passed as causi belli was the Quebec Act, which allowed the Québécois to remain Catholic, which says volumes about just how anti-Catholic the country was. A popular myth had developed that the founders of the republic and its constitution were largely non-Christian theists, but it's largely baloney. The article linked in above sort of adopts that view, without really fully expressing it, in order to avoid, most likely, that the Founders founded a Christian nation, or a Protestant one.
That aside, they certainly did found a theistic republic, and their early thoughts and documents are shot through with it. Nearly all of them, if not in fact all of them, believed in "natural law" which, as the article notes shows up in the Declaration of Independence, which states:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
And it goes on from there.
Okay, well so what?
Part of this is just historical. It's important to be accurate about a nation's history, and frankly the country was founded as a Protestant republic in which everyone, almost, was a Protestant. That was its culture, and to an enormous degree, it remains its culture today. Countries always have a culture, and beyond that, they deserve one.
But (and there's always a but), this also raises some important cultural, let alone, religious topics.
As to Protestants, one thing to keep in mind that while various Protestant denominations made up the majority of practice for Americans, there was not one single Protestant church and as the nation grew, this very much became the case. At the time of the Revolution, it would have been highly likely that almost everyone in a community in which any one person lived was the same type of Protestant. In Appalachians regions, for example, most were some type of Protestant. In New England, most were (although not all0 were likely Anglicans. There were Quakers and other sects of course, but people largely lived in a community in which everyone was a member of that sect, unless you were of a distinct minority community like Catholics and Jews.
As the country expanded, however, this began to change, a fact aided by the separation from the United Kingdom which now meant that immigrants from Norther Europe in general, rather than Great Britain in particular, were widely accepted.. European Protestant faiths that had not been in the country in large numbers began to come in, with no real opposition to that. Lutherans became very common in areas with large communities of Germans. Various Anabaptist groups, always present, likewise expanded and became very influential in some regions of the country, particularly the American South.
And into this distinctly American brands of Protestantism developed, something that Americans seem particularly ignorant of today. The "village preacher" or the church that was only loosely affiliated with a denomination became common.
Gather at the River in eight different John Ford films. Ford was a devout Catholic, and obviously saw this song as emblematic of American, and Protestant, Christianity. I've heard it in a Catholic Mass exactly once, in Pennsylvania.
This in fact became a feature of American life. Well into the 1980s, of course, most American towns were heavily represented by a wide variety of American Protestant churches, but almost all of them had what is now called "non-denominational" church headed up by a pastor who likely also worked five days out of seven in something else. That figure became such an iconic American that such pastors are portrayed again and again in American films, such as those noted above, but even in much more recent ones.
The fact that American Christianity became sufficiently separate from European Christianity mean that a sort of do it yourself Christianity took particularly strong root in the US, and also in Canada, in a way that it didn't elsewhere. Those who separated, for example, from the Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia tended to become Old Believers, or even Catholics, although populations of refugee Anabaptists came into the country as well. You don't find big populations of minority in Protestant religions anywhere else, however, in North America, save for areas that American Protestants have sought to proselytize in, some of which are areas that are already heavily Catholic or Orthodox. Unique nearly wholly American strains of Protestantism, or religions that came out of Christianity, developed.
As this occured, it had an impact on the culture noted above, and still very much does. Demographers have wondered about the rise of the "nones", but in fact they've always been there. Rank and file Protestants have often not worried much about pew hopping. People baptized in a Baptist Church will go to an Assemblies of God Church, and not think much about it. Beyond that, a fairly large group of Americans feels that they are really God-fearing Christians, even though they very rarely go to Church. I've heard people who never darken the door of a church save for a funeral or wedding discuss in earnest terms how the country needs to turn back to its Christian values, and in fairness, some do in fact practice Christian virtues fairly notably.
As the same time, however, people who claim this sort of loose ill-defined American Christianity often have completely jettisoned huge tenants of actual Christianity. People will live together without being married or otherwise engage in conduct that any conventional strain of Christianity regards as gravely sinful. Divorce, specifically prohibited by Christ, is widely practiced by American Protestants who don't give it a second thought. In some ways, the easy practice of the very loose American Protestantism ranges from religion made very, very easy, to those denominations which have very strict rules that never actually appear in the New Testament, or Old, at all.
The Pine Tree Flag, one of the flags used by American revolutionaries during the war for independence. People can say what they like, but a rebel army flying a flag like this is not battling for a secular republic. Currently, this flag is associated with a group of far right wing Evangelicals of the New Apostolic Reformation who are inaccurately defined as Christian Nationalist, but who do share significant amounts of their goals including the restoration or imposition of a Christian, by which they really mean Evangelical Protestant superstructure on the country.
Into this mix, however, we now have the New Apostolic Reformation, a Protestant movement that is confused by commentators with Christian Nationalism and even sometimes confused at to its American Protestant status.
The New Apostolic Reformation comes out of that branch of American Protestantism that has the concept that the United States itself has a particular Devine mission. This sort of thinking has roots in American Protestantism that go fairly far back in the 19th Century, and it still is particularly strong in some branches of non-mainline, if that is a word, Protestantism, and also in Great Awakening religions that came out of Protestantism. The followers of such thoughts tend to believe, for example, that certain figures (often George Washington) were charged by a Devine mission at the time of the Revolution, and also tend to believe that the U.S. Constitution was divinely inspired. You can find such thoughts today amongst various American Protestant religions outside of those which have retained strongly European roots, and also, as noted, as offshoots from Christianity. For example, you will sometimes hear the words common to the belief quoted by some Mormons, although it is not a tenant of the Mormon faith itself.
It was partially this line of thought that gave rise to the Manifest Destiny belief that many Americans held in the 19th Century, but it carried on until the 20th Century. Consider, for example, this 1900 statement after the US had taken the Philippines during the Spanish American War:
Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever, "territory belonging to the United States," as the Constitrltion calls them. And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. And we will move forward to our work, not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens, but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength, and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.
* * *
Mr. President, this question is deeper than any question of party politics: deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing hut vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given its the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: "Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many thing."
From Congressional Record(56th Cong., 1st Session) Vol XXXIII, pp.705, 711.
The concept of the US as a New Testament "chosen people" remains surprisingly strong in some quarters of American Protestantism.
The New Apostolic Reformation, faced with a United States of the early 21st Century in which the openly strong Protestant connections are now highly muted in many places, have taken this one step further than most did in the past and openly seek to establish a new wing of Protestantism which advocates for the "restoration" of perceived "lost offices" of what they conceive to have been, inaccurately, in the early Church, such as prophet and apostle. There were indeed, of course, prophets in Judaism. And there were apostles during the Apostolic Age. Indeed, as a distinctly Protestant movement, it ironically fails to grasp that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches are true Apostolic Churches, and they were founded by the apostles. Restoring the "office" of apostle is not possible, as the Apostolic Age is over and Apostolic revelation fixed, something acknowledged not only by the Apostolic Churches, but also those churches of the Protestant Reformation which arose during the Reformation, the latter of which differ on that point from the Apostolic Churches only in regard to their relationship to the Apostles.
The NAR has been particularly associated with current strains of Trumpist populism, and in a vague sort of way helps to explain what is going on. As American Protestantism outside the mainline Protestant churches has always had sort of a "do it yourself" aspect to it, it's free to conceive of a mission like the NAR's while also free to ignore vast tracks of actual Christian doctrine. Looked at that way, the NAR doesn't, at least for the time being, need to worry itself about divorce and remarriage as antithetical to Christianity, or even the requirement that Christians be their brother's keeper. Rather, the thought is, that is, by some, that political success can be achieved, after which a society modeled in their view of Christianity can be imposed from the top down.
In this fashion, the life of a figure like Donald Trump can be flat out ignored in pursuit of what is imagined to be a greater goal, which is distinctly different from the view of some other Christians that they must vote for Trump as they have no other moral choice. Looked at this way, Trump becomes some sort of latter day Cyrus the Great, a non congregant being used by God to achieve a greater goal. It's a radical belief, but it is out there.
Speaker of the House Johnson flies the Pine Tree flag outside of his Congressional office.
The flag of Vatican City. This flag can occasionally be found in Catholic Churches. I can recall at one time a point at which American flags, which also occasionally could be found in Catholic Churches in the US, were removed.
An oddity in the US is that the largest single religion in the United States is a minority religion, that being Catholicism. Most Americans are Protestants, but the single biggest faith is the Catholic faith. And contrary to what some like to suggest, not only are Catholic numbers holding their own, but they're growing. At the same time this is occurring, moreover, the second "lung" of the Church, Orthodoxy, is expanding as well.
Because this is such a Protestant country in culture and outlook, one of the things about at least a lot of Catholics in the US is that they were heavily Protestantized, something that really took off once JFK told the country he could be a Catholic on Sundays, but the country didn't really need to worry about that for the rest of the week. A disaster for Catholics, Catholics rushed to acclimate and went from being seen as vaguely strange and threatening to the rest of the country to being just one denomination. At the same time that this occured, actual reforms in the Church, combined with the "Spirit of Vatican Two" in fact made Catholics seem that way to many "main line" Protestants and also to many rank and file Catholics. Many distinctly Catholic practices that had deeply inserted themselves into Catholic culture disappeared. Catholics Masses were now in English (most places) or Spanish in some. Catholics no longer were bound to eating fish as a penitential observance on Fridays outside of Lent. Distinctive female head coverings started to disappear (prior to Vatican II, we'd note). Unique accordance of respect in a formal way towards Priests ended. A fairly uniform Catholic education ended (one that I hadn't participated in, nor had my father). A weak 1970 Catechetical set of instruction came in, leading to an entire generation, of which I am part, hardly knowing the ins and outs of their Faith by the time they passed through it.
By the 80s and 90s, members of the Church who would never have thought of marrying in a Protestant Church or church shopping were doing so. Divorce and remarriage, something long common in the Protestant churches, also came in.
In some ways, it's now easy, retrospectively, to see how this came about. A lot of this was due to what might be regarded as cultural shell shock, or as one sociologist put it in a different context, "future shock". A generally disdained people for the most part, in much of the country Catholics kept to themselves and lived in "Catholic Ghettos" where their cultural uniqueness wasn't open to the rest of the world up through the middle of the 20th Century. This was never wholly the case, of course, and there were always notable converts to Catholics who were out in the world. In the West, which always tended to break down distinctions, this was much less the case once people were outside of big cities, like Denver and Salt Lake.
Still, in that time period, most Catholics were also blue collar workers and very few, save for some in certain professional occupations, had attended university. Those that did often tried to attend a Catholic university, which in those days were really Catholic. So, in much of the country they worked blue collar jobs, if they were professional their clientele was Catholic as a rule, and they tended to live in Catholic Communities. This was true for the Orthodox as well. And it was also true for Jews. Indeed, in some ways, the overall situation of these communities resembled that of African Americans, all of whom were disdained by the Ku Klux Klan and other nativists.
World War Two started to massively erode this. For the first time large numbers of Catholics attended university and after the war, for the same reason, this continued on due to the GI Bill. The walls of the Catholic (and Orthodox) Ghettos began to come down. Vatican II came along and made institutional changes in the church. Separately, the Vatican change the liturgy to its current form, a definite improvement, and provided that it could be said in the vernacular. Bishops and Priests who assumed a certain directly from this began to expand on it, and a Catholic President came in and told Americans that Catholics were just like everyone else, something a lot of Americans rapidly embraced. Similar developments happened north of the border where the Church itself started the process of dismantling institutional control of large areas of Quebec society, which in turn developed into the Quiet Revolution.
Looking back now, lots of younger Catholics wonder why their grandparents allowed so much to erode. Why did they allow the incidents of Catholic culture to fade? Why did they put up with taking out the altar rails? Why wasn't some Latin retained? Why did the parishioners not balk when the Bishops lift year around penitential meatless Fridays? The shock of it all seems like a likely answer. Having gone from heavily Irish, or German, or Italian communities and practicing a religion that practically had its own language, and that meaning that your future in the larger, Protestant, American society was at least partially laid out for you, and limited, to one in which they were told that they were fully part of the larger consumerist limitless American society where the rules only loosely applied, and then having part of the old culture simply destroyed, they were shell shocked.
Try as the American Church of hte 70s might, the fact of the matter is that CAtholic's remain stubbornly subject to the letter to Diogentus:
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.
They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.
In other words, Catholics that came up after the 80s looked at what the World had given to accommodating Catholics of the late 60s, 70s, and 80s, and found it wholly wanting. Like topics, we're otherwise writing on in slow motion, tradition, which turns out to be grounded in something real, and there's an effort to take it back. As that's being done, it's the case that the reforms that came in are being rejected, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
Trad girls in conservative skirts and wearing chapel veils, young men fairly conservatively dressed, parishioners attempting to secure Latin Masses, or going to Easter Rite Devine Liturgy, aren't seeking to reform the reform, which up until recently was the vanguard of a return to tradition. They're seeking to wholesale bring the incidents of Catholicism back in. In doing that, they're making it plain that they're not just another denomination, and they don't want to really be part of the American religious scene. Whether they're applying the Benedict Option or the Constantine one, they're not only not melting in, they're returning to wholesale different. And that different doesn't look back to 1776, it looks all the way back.
So why does any of this matter?
Cyrus the Great. Some far right Evangelicals tend to see Trump as a sort of Cyrus figure. Cyrus was not Jewish, but his proclimations favored the Jewish faith in an existential sense.
Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying: 'Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD, the God of heaven, given me; and He hath charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whosoever there is among you of all His people—his God be with him—let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the LORD, the God of Israel, He is the God who is in Jerusalem. And whosoever is left, in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help him with silver, and with gold, and with goods, and with beasts, beside the freewill-offering for the house of God which is in Jerusalem.'
Ezra 1:1–4
Well, it does, for a variety of reasons, some mild, and some a bit scary.
One thing is this. It used to be particularly noted by some that the English-speaking world was particularly given to democracy, which it was. Those with a limited horizon tended to associate this solely with the United States, but that was in fact extremely inaccurate. The United Kingdom had a functioning parliament in 1776 when we abandoned the UK's overlordship, and in fact that is part of the reason that we did that. They had a Parliament, and they weren't letting us in.
A person can say what they want about that and try to disassociate it somehow from something particularly English, but it is there. France, in 1776, wasn't democratic. Spain wasn't either. You can't really find another major power that was. And all of England's progeny took this path for a long time. Canada never had a non-democratic moment. Nor did New Zealand, or Australia.
Now, English democracy was not perfect, and the franchise was not even particularly large. Major classes were completely excluded based on economic, and also in the case of Catholics, religion. But it was there and that heritage was conveyed. Moreover, when it took root in North America, it expanded beyond what it had been in the UK pretty rapidly.
Which leads us to a more radical proposition.
What was also conveyed early on was a certain culture, and part of that was a political culture. The overall culture, however, was Protestant. And it remains so. It's so Protestant that even the atheists are culturally Protestant.
An essential element of that American Protestantism is the concept of "I can make up my mind for myself and nobody can tell me what to do". Lots of religious "reformers" in the US have done that, but that's a Protestant thing. To Protestants, it's not strange to hop from one Protestant denomination to another, and to even include denominations that claim to have no denomination, even though the they do. Catholics and Jews, on the other hand, are part of one, big, global, faith. Moving from parish to parish, for Catholics, is no big deal, as Catholicism is the Church. But going to another denomination is an extraordinarily radical move and an act of rebellion.
Democracy, of course, as a movement has spread well beyond the English-speaking world and indeed, there were democracies that spring up in various places in the non Protestant world, as for in example Italian city states. Antiquarians will point out the example of ancient Athens, or even Germanic and Nordic raiding bands. On the last item, all people are democratic at the tribal level, pretty much. None of this really counters the point, however.
This brings us to the next reason this is important. The most recent movement, which is threading through American Evangelicalism, is radically exclusionary in a way, and this too is part of the North American religious heritage.
It wasn't until after the Civil War that American society really started to view Catholics as suitable citizens,a and then only reluctantly. The huge Irish and German immigrant populations that fought in the war made Catholics impossible to really ignore. Jewish Americans were really small in number, but they started to be accepted, very reluctantly, about the same time. As this occured the word "Judeo-Christian" was invented to include everyone then in the country in a singular larger American Christian sort of world. But the fact remains that hostility towards both religions, and more recently Islam, has been an ongoing feature of American life.
Catholics, and if there are any, Jews and Muslims (the latter two unlikely in any numbers) flirting with the new concepts of Christian Nationalism and National Conservatism really need to do so at their caution. The New Apostolic Reformation forces may have a similar view on moral matters as mainstream and conservative Catholics do, but the NAR is definitely not Catholic. And the history for Americans of general of politics and religion being welded together, and indeed coopting each other, is not a comfortable one at all. Put another way, Donald Trump is not a deeply religious, or even moral, man, and there's no real reason to believe that he's some sort of Cyrus the Great.
But some clearly see him that way, explaining their actions, and even some of the odd propoganda in the Trumpist camp.
None of this is to say that faith shouldn't inform a person's politics. It should. But they are not the same thing.
Footnotes:
1. Native Americans of course had their own religions, but what was different about their history, up until the early 20th Century, is that unless highly assimilated, they weren't "Americans" at all. It wasn't until 1924, a date which our 100 year retrospective posts haven't even yet reached, that all Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship.
1. What is "proportionality" in a war with an opponent that's genocidal?
So what, exactly, is proportional to people who will do that?
We keep hearing the response should be proportional, but proportional to what?
How far does being proportional with homicidal forces go?
What it doesn't mean is that "you killed ten, so we get to kill ten."
What was proportional to the Holocaust, if that was the measure during World War Two? It wasn't, of course, but was proportional to being invaded by the Nazis?
2. Why should the response be proportional?
Mind you, I think it should, but I'm a Catholic. Catholics developed the theory of just war.
Most peoples don't have a theory of just war, although the Israeli's by Jewish tradition would, as the Old Testament at least tangentially discusses it.
Does Islam? I have no idea.
Anyhow, when people say a war should be proportional, what they're implying is that the war should be fought as if it's being fought by Christians, which implies that the Christian world view is correct. It's an entire package. If you adopt just part of it, you reject all of it, which means, in the end, accepting that fighting war the old way is just fine.
Most non-Christian people, when they fight wars, don't worry about proportionality. We instinctively know that. That's why we are horrified by the Germans in World War Two, but pretty much yawn about Japanese atrocities. And that's why were are justifiably horrified by My Lai in Vietnam, but don't really worry that much about the NVA in Hue.
It's probably also, at least partially, why we worry about what the IDF does in Gaza, but are pretty acceptable of Hamas being willing to kill everyone, pretty much in Israel.
We ought not to think that way.
3. Why does Hamas get a pass with so many people and Israel does not?
What the root of that?
It's either anti-Semitism (which a lot of it is) or that we, ironically, hold Israel to a higher standard, which means that we hold Hamas to a very low one. We discussed that above.
The most disturbing part is that there remains a lot of people who really hate the Jews. And it comes out, strangely, in the left in recent years, which is more closely associated with that demographic than the right.
But perhaps we should not be surprised. The extreme left has always surfaced in the popular left, and since the early 20th Century it's always been genocidal. It loved bloody Lenin, then Stalin, and so on. That it would love Hamas, in the same spirit that it loved the Reds, isn't really too surprising.
4. Why do we keep saying that "Hamas doesn't represent the Palestinians?".
There's no evidence of that, except that the last election in Gaza was quite a few years ago. So we really don't know. Hamas might represent the views of the majority of Palestinians. What if that's true?
And why do the Palestinians uniquely get a pass this way. People would shout down somebody stating that "most Germans weren't Nazi's".
The Provisional Government of Azad Hind ("Free India") was declared with Subhas Chandra as president. Its territory, such as it was, were those portions of Indian occupied by Japan.
It immediately declared it was entering the war on the Japanese side, an example of really not grasping the direction things were headed in, and in fact already well advanced towards.
On the same day, Japan began drafting high school and university students.
The Germans began liquidating the Minsk Ghetto as they were retreating from Belarus.
The RAF made a highly destructive raid on Kassel.
Algerian Jews, 140,000 in number were restored French citizenship, which had been restricted, along with the same for Algerian Arabs, on March 17, 1942 by Gen. Henri Giraud. Arabs had to apply for restoration of their French citizenship.
Everyone has the right to defend themselves. Even Pope Francis, who is on the rather liberal end of many things, agrees with this.
But what is proportional to an enemy who has vowed to murder the populace and demonstrated that intent with murdering babies?
And let us be honest. The claim, "the majority of Palestinian people do not support Hamas" is pretty much equivalent to "most Germans weren't Nazi's", isn't it? It's thin. Indeed, maybe for those in the Middle East today, it has even less credibility. Certainly here in the US, in spite of separation from the artificial boundaries of the legacy of the Ottoman Empire and the Great War, plenty of Palestinians and their first generation descendants have rallied to the bloody cause as so many Palestinians have in the past, demonstrating that lamenting the results of bad decisions seems to be an intergenerational habit.
Congressman Rashida Tlaib, who was quick to accuse the IDF of rocketing a Palestinian hospital that in fact Islamic Jihad, which would regard her as an abhorrent example of a woman who should be out of government, accidentally rocketed.
But does that matter?
And did it in 1945?
And let us be further honest. The concept of proportionality is a Christian one. No other culture worries about it to the same extent that Christian ones do, and if it is now a global concept, it's' due in no small measure to Christianity. Everyone protesting for proportionality does so in hopes that it reaches a Christian audience. The historical global norm, outside of Judaism and Christianity (and I'll confess ignorance on Islam), was for slaughter.
It's the Christian influence that's made it unacceptable. For pagan people, and non-Abrahamic people? Well, that was what was done.
So we are left, then, with what is proportionality?
Was destroying Berlin in 1945 proportional to the Nazi genocidal imperial regimes? Or would it have been better to say, well, not all Germans were Nazis? Or did that, with a threat like Nazism, not really matter that much?
Questions that have to be answered. And the namby pampy "let's condemn overreaction" have to answer them most of all.
Or does it?
Does staying a hand, display more strength than using it? Turn, as it were, the other cheek?
And can we, even with the descent into liberal secularism, which seems to solely involve what's under our Fruit of the Looms, avoid answering them, in real, bloody, terms, rather than platitudes?
I offer no solutions, or answers.
I'm only posing the questions. With, of course, the proviso that if you answer wrong, there's blood on your hands, one away, or the other.
It was inevitable that the war in Israel would spill over to the United States in terms of internal politics. That this makes it different from every war since the Anglo Irish War, which also did, makes it unique. North America does have a fairly large Ukrainian ex pat population, and a fairly large population of descendants of Ukrainians, but they're largely out of view, and therefore out of mind. Because of that, people like Matt Gaetz can choose to suggest that we leave Ukrainians to the tender mercies of the Russians, but he can't say the same thing about Israel.
But we now also have a large immigrant Palestinian population in the US, and a significant one in Australia as well. Other Palestinian populations are in Europe. This has given us the shocking, to most people, example of people demonstrating either for Palestine or against Israel, depending upon how you think of it.
Which leads me to this:
I think people will not believe the reports of what happened in Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Beeri. Even though Hamas posted photos and videos on their own Telegram channel. Because these are ISIS tactics. Beheaded babies and burned corpses. Yes, I saw the photos.
I don't care if you are of Palestinian extraction or not, although I frankly feel that this adds fuel to the fire that the further away from the prevailing culture an immigrant population is, the harder it is for the "melting pot" (the antithesis of the currently popular but demonstratively false concept of "diversity is strength" ethos) to work. It can, but it's harder. At any rate, people had no sympathy at all with German immigrants and German Americans who were in support of the Nazis during the Second World War, and Hamas deserves no sympathy either. It doesn't matter if you are of Palestinian extraction or not.
I'd also note that one member of Congress of Middle Eastern extraction keeps a Palestinian flag outside of her door, and as of yesterday, still was. Frankly, no Congressman should keep any flag other than that of the U.S. or perhaps their state outside their door.
None.
This causes me to recall my father, who never liked people using hyphens in their name to identify themselves as something other than American. Half German and half Irish by descent, he didn't like, for example, when people called themselves "Irish Americans", a trait he shared with Theodore Roosevelt.
This also says something about preserving old fights, something many cultures and peoples do.
Palestinians are upset, in part, about something that took place running from the late 19th Century to the mid 20th Century, that being the return of Jews to what is now Israel, as well as the history that followed. The spreading of Jews around the ancient world started as long ago as 586 BC but it got rolling in the modern era in the 60s and of course we can famously date it to 70, the year of the destruction of the Temple. The Zionist movement began the return starting in 1897 with the creation of a modern Jewish state an expressed goal. Palestine, part of the Arab world, but in a region that already had a Jewish and Greek population, was the old Israel, territory wise. Its population was also not uniformly Islamic, having an Arab Christian population, which it still does, and which is hated by Hamas along with the Jewish Israeli population. The Jewish population of the country doesn't necessarily get along that well with the Christian population either. The Palestinian identity itself is hard to define, as the region was so mixed up to the point of Israeli independence. The term apparently wasn't used in modern times, ironically, until 1898, although some argue that Palestinian nationalism was around as early as an 1834 rebellion against Egypt. Like other regions of the coast Middle East during the Ottoman period, the region was inhabited by nomadic Bedouins, still not identified as Palestinians, and then more urban and agricultural people, something true of Lebanon and Syria as well.
For this reason It's occasionally suggested that the Palestinians are not a real people at all, and to some slight extent, and it would be slight, that would have been almost sort of true at one time. Having said that, the people who inhabit Lebanon historically are a different ethnicity. So the Palestinians are a real people, or came to be, and certainly are now.
Palestine, like the entire Middle East, east of Egypt, was an Ottoman possession prior to World War One. For that matter, things west of Palestine technically were as well, although the oddities of colonialism and international politics meant that the British controlled Egypt and the Ottomans really controlled nothing, at that point, further east. World War One brought Palestine under British rule, as a League of Nation's mandate, and brought Syria and Lebanon under French rule the same way. Jordan came to be administered by the British as well, through the Hashemite ruling family, as did Iraq.
Allenby entering Jerusalem.
Palestine always proved to be problematic for the British and between the wars there was increasing tension between its Jewish and Arab populations, in part brought about by the fact that the British had made promises in the Balfour Agreement which supported, more or less, the concept of Palestine becoming the home for a future Jewish state.
At the time of Balfour's declaration, the Jewish population, even with two decades if immigration, was pretty small and the declaration wasn't really very specific. From a British prospective, they were really dealing with a sparsely populated land. At the same time, however, they made promises to Arabs through their leaders to support outright Arab independence in the Middle East. The two sets of promises were not necessarily irrconcilable, but they weren't necessary easy to deal with on the ground.
The additional problem really was that the land was not the United Kingdom's to give and indeed, in 1917, when made, it was still an Ottoman possession.
Between World War One and World War Two the British had to live with this, which wasn't easy.
By the 1930s Palestinian populations were getting seriously agitated with the direction in which things seemed to be going. In 1936 this lead to a revolt against the British in which the Palestinians demanded independence and an end to open ended Jewish immigration. To an extent, because of the involvement of the local populations, this may be regarded as the first Arab Isreali War, or perhaps a proto war, a sign of things to come. Interestingly, Bernard Law Montgomery had a signficant role in putting it down.
Perhaps because of this, during World War Two, while the British did have armed Arab formations, they were reluctant to really use them. Also during World War Two, the Grand Mufti of Jersusalem came down on the side of the Germans. The nature of the conflict as an ethnic one was clearly drawn.
World War Two created the drive towards an independent Jewish Israel as an unstoppable one, with refugees flooding ino the coutnry. The British saw the handwriting on the wall and looked for a way out of the region, which they succeeded in doing in 1948. Before that, an attempt at imposing a sort of two state solution was made.
Israel delcared independence in 1948 and the Arabs opposed it. In spite of an advantage of arms on part of the Arab armies, and in spite of having established military units of some standing, and in the case of the Arab Legion, partial European leadership, Israel won the war. The war had huge demographic consequences as 700,000 or more Palestinians became refugees and were later unable to return to the lands they'd abandoned or been forced out of. That's the root of the Palestinian discontent today.
The ultimate cause of Palestinian dispersal is mixed, some of it being due to fear, some of it being due to force, and some of it being Israel preventing their return by operation of law. I'm not claiming it was just. But an added factor to it was that the neighboring Arab states did not accommodate a permanent resettlement of the displaced, hoping instead to see Israel defeated in a series of subsequent wars. By the early 1960s the population was radicalizing and in 1964 the Palestinian Liberation Organization formed. The PLO ended up going to war with one of its host nations, Jordan, in 1970 in a war which looked as if the PLO might overthrow the Hashemite kingdom and claim it for its own. Jordan prevailed in the Black September war and the PLO relocated to troubled Lebanon. In 1982, it was driven out of that country, which had been created in the first place as a separate political entity for Christian Syrians, and it relocated to Tunis. Ultimately the PLO came around to the political solution that's in place to day, with the Palestinian authority being a quasi independent Palestinian satellite territory, of which Gaza is part.
After the War of Independence.
What was never foreseen is that Hamas, which is more radical than the PLO and its political expression Fatah, would become the dominant political entity in the Palestinian parliament. It is. Backed by money brought in from the outside, and notably Iran, it thrives on the fantasy of driving the Jews out of what had been Palestine.
Israel has been independent for seventy-five years now. Almost everyone who fought for or against its independence is now dead. The youngest displaced Palestinians are 75 years old. The land that they were displaced from has been in other hands for 75 years. The legacy of this however goes on and on with both sides focusing on a narrow aspect of the history. Israelis, and the country's supporters around the world, imagine an early Israeli history like that glamorized by Leon Uris which ignored the realities of Palestinian displacement. Palestinians remain bitter about being displaced, a bitterness which is aided by their untenable situation in some parts of the Palestinian Authority but fail to appreciate that they made a bad bargain in 1948 by insisting on taking all of the country. Part of that bad bargain is that there is no reason to believe that had the Arabs won in 1948, the result would have been murderous and certainly would have resulted in the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine, just as Europeans were expelled from Algeria (and their Berber allies murdered) and the Europeans from Libya. For much of the post 1948 period, and for Hams to this day, Arab goals have been been to expel the Jewish population rather than to live with it, although over time, Egypt and Jordan have relented. Hamas also fails to appreciate that they're as boxed in by the Arab neighbors who claim to support them as they are by Israel.
Impacting the entire matter, both sides, now 75 years into this, rely upon economic aid from the outside. Israel, while often gaining the admiration of Americans for such things as "making the desert bloom" has consistenly relied on US aid from its independence, something that frankly does not make a great deal of sense in an era when US ecnomic fortunes have declined and there is no good reason why a capable foeign nation of this vintage is receiving US aid. Ireland, for instance, was simply independent when it became independent. Included in the aid is military aid, even though Israel is itself an arms manufacuturer. The close economic link to the US makes the US a participant in the Middle East in a way that it would not otherwise be, which in turn has an impact on domestic politics.
Hamas depends entirely on aid from donors and regional states, with Iran being a signficant one. Oddly enough, the relocation of Palestinians to the US is beginning to also have an impact on domestic U.S. politics.
Seventy-five years is not a long time in historical terms, but the reality of this is that Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization that is fighting for a fantasy against living people who are innocent of any wrongdoing, for the most part, against the Palestinians. The murderous fantasy is helping to keep a real solution, if there is one, from occurring. No sane people would enter into a bargain with a group whose goals are essentially genocidal. Also helping to prevent it from occurring is the fact that the Arabs are a group of people, not one people, and the other Arab nations really don't want the Palestinians on their land. Egypt is not going to open up the border with Gaza and let them in. Jordan was happy to take the West Bank early on, but it's not clamoring for it back now. Israel, by having the Palestinians within some sort of border, neatly keeps them from being within other Arab borders.
People have talked about a two-state solution for a long time, but no such solution can come about when one party will not think of it. Hamas won't, and now surely Israel will not either.
So now what?
That's hard to say, but what seems certain is that Israel will go into Gaza and will be unwilling to let the enclave repeat this recent murderous history. Hamas will cause the Palestinians to suffer for holding on to a pipe dream and allowing murder to be perpetrated in their name. The Palestinians will be seemingly unable to grasp this and howl in rage and despair, rather than taking the example of other 20th Century displaced persons, such as the Germans and Poles, and build new lives in their new situation. Of course, unlike the Germans and the Poles, there isn't much for them to build with, but by the same token, there was never much of a Palestine in the first place. Other Arab nations that import labor, such as Saudi Arabia, are unlikely for their part to take in the Palestinian displaced population, even though they share, albeit more remotely than we might suppose, an ethnicity.
Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel timed for the Yom Kippur holy day. The attack oddly commenced at 2:05 p.m.
It would be the largest of the Arab Israeli Wars, and one in which the Israeli Defense Force fared much more poorly than it had previously. Egypt's goals were limited, involving crossing the Suez Canal, which they succeeded in doing. Israeli forces would ultimately repulse the invading forces and come very near the Syrian capital of Damascus, but the results allowed the Egyptians to bargain for peace terms with Israel in later years.
Arab forces fared very well at first, catching the IDF off guard. Syrian advances caused the Israeli government to distribute Israel's small stock of nuclear weapons to is air force in case Arab forces advanced inside Israel itself, making this a non superpower war that came relatively close to becoming a nuclear one.
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