All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post German Health Minister Admits COVID Jabs Can Cause ‘Permanent Disabilities,’ Contradicting Past Statements appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Italy Coronavirus: New Explosive Information appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Police Violence. Has France become a Police State? Bastille 2.0?: 3.5 Million People Mobilize against Macron appeared first on Global Research.

Pushback against ‘foreign agent’ laws in Georgia should not stop us from asking whether countries have a right to limit foreign influence

Four decades ago, late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin told then-Senator Joe Biden: I am not a Jew with trembling knees. The post Biden snubs Netanyahu, won’t invite him to the White House; Israel must remain proud – opinion appeared first on World Israel News.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Global Governance by Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Unaccountable Tyranny appeared first on Global Research.

'From the evidence we have obtained, the motivation appears to be financial. The organizer they consulted with was a fellow countryman in Iran.' The post Greece: Terror suspects were offered money to target Jews appeared first on World Israel News.

Anti-judicial reform protesters plan to form ‘Citizens Police.’ The post Will Israel’s new left-wing militia face off against Ben Gvir’s National guard? appeared first on World Israel News.

Yousaf had served as media spokesperson for Islamic Relief Worldwide, which the Israeli government had designated a “terrorist front” in 2006. The post New Scottish leader sides with Palestinians, has ties with terror groups appeared first on World Israel News.

Azerbaijan inaugurated its embassy in Tel Aviv in the presence of the country's Foreign Minister and new ambassador and the Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen. The post WATCH: Azerbaijan opens first-ever embassy in Israel appeared first on World Israel News.

New axis of evil: Former President Donald Trump tells 'Hannity' he spoke amicably with Russian leader; Chinese balloon incident wouldn't have happened if he were in charge. The post WATCH: This wouldn’t have happened if I was president, says Trump appeared first on World Israel News.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Canadians Protest Outside US Embassy Against Biden’s Visit appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Congress Has Been Captured by the Arms Industry appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Video: US-NATO Proxy War in Ukraine Utilizes Space Technology appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Former Wall Street Analyst Counts the True Cost of COVID-19 Vaccines. appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post US and Taiwan Plan to Equip Kiev Regime Forces with ‘Swarms-of-swarms’ Drones appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post China: Democracy and Development appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Video: What Is “American Exceptionalism”? Ray McGovern and Judge Napolitano appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post A State of Never-Ending Crisis: The Government Is Fomenting Mass Hysteria appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Why Most of the World Isn’t on Board with the NATO-Russia War appeared first on Global Research.

Demonstrators chanted, 'Get out Israel from U-20 World Cup.' The post FIFA removes Indonesia as World Cup host due to protests against Israel’s participation appeared first on World Israel News.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post The Digital Iron Curtain: How the RESTRICT Act Threatens to Devastate Privacy and Crush Free Speech Online appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post UN Security Council Won’t Probe Nord Stream Bombing appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Serbia and Hungary Form Strategic Council Despite EU Opposition appeared first on Global Research.

Likud files criminal complaint against television writer, producer Gior Chamizer, accusing him of incitement to murder. The post Israeli TV producer accused of calling for Netanyahu’s assassination appeared first on World Israel News.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid has repeatedly said he will roll back everything on the day he returns to power. The post What’s to stop the next government from reversing judicial reform? appeared first on World Israel News.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Where Did the Claim that “97% of Scientists” Believe Climate Change Is a Man-Made, Urgent Problem Come From? Is It True? appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Radical Protests in France, A Province of the Global Orwellian Empire. Can Fascism be Overcome? appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post “Facing Clear Evidence of Peril” in a Country of Lies. “Money is the Dirty Secret of all News” appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Romanian TAROM Flight RO-7673 Diverted. 30-Year Old Pilot Had Chest Pain and Collapsed In-flight. Seventh Pilot Incident this Month appeared first on Global Research.

There definitely is a serious problem in Israel, but it’s not what you think. The post What is REALLY going on in Israel? – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.

After 16 years in power, the SNP is stagnating. With these 16 policies, the new first minister can change that

The ambassador stressed that the visa exemption, which is expected to be finalized in fall 2023, should not be framed as a victory for Netanyahu. The post US Ambassador Nides tells Israelis: Don’t thank Bibi for visa waiver appeared first on World Israel News.

'It should be clear to the entire world - the people here voted in an election, and they have their priorities,' said Ben-Gvir. The post Israel ‘is not another star on the American flag’: Ben-Gvir blasts Biden appeared first on World Israel News.

Mass Psychosis: When Will We Free Ourselves From Toxic Propaganda, If Not Now? By Mark Taliano, March 28, 2023 If mass psychosis entails a detachment from reality, then Westerners in particular are suffering from mass-psychosis on myriad issues. Now … The post Selected Articles: Mass Psychosis: When Will We Free Ourselves From Toxic Propaganda, If Not Now? appeared first on Global Research.

… The post Punjab: Democracy Under Siege? appeared first on Global Research.

… The post Build the Movement to Oppose AUKUS Nuclear Submarines appeared first on Global Research.

OPINION: Tennessee’s ban on drag in the presence of minors is a ‘gateway law’ to harsher anti-LGBTQ repression

… The post Video: Strength of New Multipolar World Alliances. Future of Taiwan & NATO Mission in Asia appeared first on Global Research.

Dr. Uzi Rubin, a missile and defense analyst, explains the purpose of the Ofek 13 satellite and the significance of its successful launch, as well as its likely target: monitoring Iran's nuclear weapons production. The post WATCH: Israel launches surveillance satellite in impressive feat of technology appeared first on World Israel News.

The Florida governor is a possible candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential elections. The post DeSantis to visit Israel next month, ahead of expected presidential run appeared first on World Israel News.

Nashville shooter who murdered six people, including three children, felt 'no other effective way to be seen,' a radical trans group says. The post Did left-wing trans group justify mass murder? appeared first on World Israel News.

Compromising on humanitarian visas could allow the Illegal Migration Bill to end territory-based asylum in the UK

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article … The post Israel Protests: “Democracy” in an Apartheid Regime? appeared first on Global Research.

Ancient fishhooks, among the oldest ever found, used to hunt sharks or large fish, were discovered in Ashkelon. The post What does discovery of ancient tool tell us about Ashkelon’s history? appeared first on World Israel News.

A jury recently found Rebecca Payne guilty of murdering her husband, 68-year-old Noel Payne, in Walpeup, a small town in ... Read more

Exclusive: A new report has warned homelessness services in the UK are not prepared for the climate crisis

On Sunday evening, six young girls were tragically killed after a severe accident occurred on a Tennessee freeway. According to ... Read more

On Sunday evening, a tragic incident occurred at a Starbucks in Vancouver, Canada. Paul Stanley Schmidt, 37, was fatally stabbed ... Read more

The 44-day Azeri-Turkish war against the Armenian people of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) was supposed to have been halted in November 2020 by a trilateral ceasefire agreement between Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia. Nonetheless, Azeri aggression and violations against the Armenian people have not subsided. While systematically refusing to comply with international law, Azerbaijan has continued to violate the borders of the Republic of Armenia by killing or kidnapping Armenian soldiers. On March 22, Armenian soldier Arshak Sargsyan was killed by Azerbaijani fire near the Yeraskh village on the Armenia-Azerbaijan (Nakhichevan) border. Azerbaijan is also illegally blocking the only access road to the people of Artsakh. Furthermore, the torturing and murdering of Armenian prisoners of war (POWs) continue. One such Armenian hostage is Vicken Euljekjian, a 44-year-old Armenian-Lebanese man who has been jailed by Azerbaijan since November 2020. Vicken and his friend, Maral Najarian, are both ethnic Armenians with dual citizenships of Armenia and Lebanon. They were arrested on November 10, 2020, near the Armenian city of Shushi in Artsakh, currently occupied by Azerbaijan. The arrests reportedly happened 10 hours after the ceasefire agreement. Soon after, they were transferred along with other Armenian hostages to a prison in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. Although Maral was released after four months, Vicken was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment following sham trials without adequate legal representation.  Currently, Vicken is spending his sentence in solitary confinement in one of the world’s most notorious prisons. Given the risk to his physical and mental health, his family is highly concerned. According to a news report from June 1, 2021, Vicken was transferred from the prison to a hospital. Vicken had worked as a taxi driver before the war. Azerbaijan accused him of “being a terrorist and a mercenary, as well as having illegally entered Azerbaijan”. Najarian risked similar accusations before being released and repatriated in March 2021. Vicken was found guilty after a short trial that was condemned by Armenia’s government and human rights groups as a travesty of justice. Liparit Drmeyan, an aide to Armenia’s representative to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), said Vicken did not have access to lawyers that were chosen by him. Two years after Maral’s release, the number of Armenian POWs held in Azerbaijan remains unclear. What is clear, though, is that Vicken and other POWs continue to be abused by Azeri authorities.  Garo Ghazarian, an attorney and Chairman of the “Center for Law and Justice — Tatoyan Foundation USA” which is based in Los Angeles, has been monitoring the situation of the Armenian POWs in Azerbaijan. Ghazarian told this author that there are at least 33 prisoners in Azeri jails. “There is no question that Azerbaijan is violating the ‘Trilateral Statement’ of 2020; their mistreatment of the Armenian POWs violates the Geneva Convention,” he added. This author spoke with Linda Iman Ahmad Arous, Vicken’s wife, who lives in Lebanon and is anxiously waiting for her husband’s return.   Vicken and Linda have 2 children: Serge (23) and Christine (20).  Linda said her husband owned a restaurant in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He also owned a house in Shushi, a historically Armenian city in Artsakh that was captured by Azerbaijan during the 44-day Azeri war. Linda told this author: “On November 10, 2020, he was going to Shushi with a friend of ours, Maral, who also owns a house there. He was arrested at a checkpoint by the Azerbaijani army.” Linda has very limited communication with her imprisoned husband: “Vicken calls me once a month when the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visits him. Azeri authorities do not allow us to speak Arabic, and this makes it difficult for us to communicate because I do not speak Armenian. And Vicken can’t speak at ease on the phone. All he says to me is ‘get me out of here quickly, I can’t take it anymore.’ I only see a 50 second video of him. He looks so different, tired, and scared. I don’t know anything about his current health, but he suffers from a heart condition and a disc in his back.  “Maral, who was detained with him, told me that he was tortured to say that he was receiving money [from Armenia], and they forced Maral to testify about him under pressure to say that he is a terrorist suspect. I have a full legal confession that Maral made here in Lebanon.” Linda shared with this author the legal document which included a summary of a witness interview that Sheila Paylan, an international human rights lawyer and former legal advisor to the United Nations, made with Maral on June 18, 2021. In the interview, Maral said that when she and Vicken were arrested by Azeri forces, they took their telephones, wallets, passports, IDs and everything else they had. They also beat Vicken: “We were then separated, and in the first eight days of our detention I was interrogated twice… I saw Vicken three times. The last day I saw Vicken was on November 18, my birthday. They called him, we sat together for a little bit, fifteen minutes, and on the next day they sent us to jail. I never saw him again. “During my third interrogation, which must have been sometime in February 2021, the interrogator told me that ‘Vicken has confessed to everything and has said that he had gone to fight for money as a mercenary, and if you do not confess the same thing, then you will be just as guilty and accused as Vicken.'” In Maral’s testimony in Lebanon, she said she had been forced to say that Vicken was “a mercenary and had been hired to fight for Armenia for 2500 dollars”. They recorded her saying this, and every time she said something they disapproved of, they stopped the recording and made her say the exact things she was compelled to say.  “This went on for hours,” Maral said. “I asked them ‘why are you doing this?’ and they said ‘we want the tape in which you speak to be uniform and uncut, for there to be no interruptions.’ “Then they forced me to sign a declaration that everything I said in the video was true and that I said entirely what I wanted to say willingly. But what I said in the video, which they used against Vicken in his trial, was not really true. I just said whatever they wanted me to say because I felt like I had no other option. I was terrified, alone and helpless. I felt intimidated. I absolutely had to do what they told me to do. The few times that I tried to explain or testify the way I wanted to, they would shout ‘no’! This is the way you must say it!’ So I did.  “Neither Vicken nor I were terrorists. They are saying that he is a terrorist, a murderer, a criminal, but he is none of those things at all. He does not deserve to be punished like this. Please help him.” The British Armenian Humanitarian Group, who started an online petition to help release the Armenian POWs, reports: “Azerbaijan continues to hold unlawfully Armenian civilian hostages and POWs captured during the 44-day war, in gross violation of The Third Geneva Convention on the Treatment of POWs. More hostages were taken in 2021 and 2022 after the military aggressions on the sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia. Azerbaijan claims there are only 33 Armenian captives, but human rights lawyers working with families of captives reckon the number is close to 118 unless all other Armenian hostages have been murdered in captivity… “In summer 2021, 68 of those hostages were sentenced unlawfully to long imprisonments under false accusations and without access to fair legal representation.   “In May 2021, further two Armenian POWs – Ishkhan Sargsyan and Vladimir Rafaelyan – were captured by Azerbaijani forces near the lake Sev following the Azerbaijani aggression on the Republic of Armenia. One year ago, in March 2022, these two young servicemen, Ishkhan and Vladimir, were sentenced to 19- and 18-years imprisonment by the Baku courts. “Meanwhile, in the course of 2021 and 2022 half of those Armenian hostages sentenced during Baku sham trials, were returned to Armenia following high-level interventions from the USA, France and the EU.” Armenian hostages illegally held by Azerbaijan are being ill-treated and even tortured by Azerbaijan whilst the “civilized world” remains silent, watching idly as they give Azerbaijan further military aid, and establish new oil deals and commercial agreements. Meanwhile, Linda and her children are counting the days before they are reunited with Vicken. “I love Vicken with all my heart,” Linda said. “I will not be silent until he comes back home. The world has forgotten these prisoners for the past three years. Prisons in Baku are notorious places of torment for Armenians. I can hear Vicken’s screams ever since Maral told me what she saw. Maral said the last time she saw Vicken in Baku, his hands were deformed, and the bones of his hands were visible. This shows how he was tortured. I and our whole family wait every day for the news of his return. Every day, I see him in my dreams entering the door of our home.” Vicken and his wife, Linda. The post <strong>Azerbaijan Continues Torture of Armenian Hostages</strong> appeared first on Providence.

Trent Lehrkamp, a 19-year-old from Brunswick, Georgia, experienced a horrific hazing incident involving minors last week on March 21. Reports ... Read more

OPINION: Focusing on the gender of officers is misleading – violence and intimidation are integral to policing

A tragic fire occurred on Monday night in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, along the U.S. border, where doezens of migrants lost ... Read more

The group say they're being overlooked for social housing and have accused Tower Hamlets Council of discrimination

As a new report labels asylum accommodation ‘de-facto detention’, a mother details her family’s struggle

This legislation is going to make some traffickers very happy

Recently, Nigerians went to the polls to elect a new president. Voters faced violent attacks from thugs and even terrorists in addition to withstanding long delays due to election officials who showed up hours late to their polling locations. The ones who made it to the polls were the lucky ones—many were unable to even travel because of fuel shortages and chaos caused by a new currency system. But for Nigerians, these are not new difficulties. Violence is a daily fear across the entire country, which has the largest population and economy in Africa. Corruption and incompetency on the part of government is expected. Nigerians are in desperate need of political change, and as proof of this, voter registration numbers prior to the election broke records. But once again, daily life in Nigeria conspired against the average person. As to be expected given this degree of societal chaos, legal disputes erupted immediately between the declared winner of the election, Bola Tinubu, and his challengers, with all sides claiming victory. Follow-up gubernatorial elections were filled with brutal instances of ethnic-based violence. The post-election turmoil Nigeria now faces is but a reflection of the deep-seated tensions that plague our society. With daily life in Nigeria so uncertain for the average citizen, and human rights so flagrantly and regularly abused, the harsh reality is that we are far from a functioning democracy. I speak from my own experience as a human rights lawyer in Nigeria. In Northern Nigeria, twelve states have Sharia-based criminal codes that mandate the death penalty for any Muslim who says something that could be construed as insulting to the Quran or the Prophet Muhammad. These blasphemy laws are in flagrant violation of the Nigerian Constitution, as well as international treaties we have signed. And yet in our democracy, does anyone do anything to stop these laws? I have recently represented two individuals convicted for their alleged blasphemy. One was Omar Farouq, a minor who was accused, convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in prison for alleged blasphemy against Islam. Only after years of international outcry was he freed. But the other young man I represent, Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, still sits in prison, now for three years. His “crime” was sending two WhatsApp audio messages with lyrics he composed describing the beliefs of his particular sect of Sufi Islam. Those who took offense to them burned down his home, and he was swiftly convicted without a lawyer and sentenced to death by hanging. We were able to secure a dismissal for Omar, but the same day that dismissal came down, Yahaya was sent back for a retrial instead. Now we are appealing to the Supreme Court of Nigeria, in the first case of its kind, to overturn these vile and unconstitutional laws, and save Yahaya’s life. Nigeria’s Constitution is supposed to protect freedom of expression and freedom of religion. We are not supposed to have any religion as an “official” religion in our federal and state governments. We have joined international treaties both with the United Nations and the African Union that are meant to protect individuals’ abilities to freely share their beliefs and live out their faith.  But if Nigeria does not honor these commitments in our actions, then these are just words on pieces of paper. If the international community does not speak out, then our leaders will get away with regularly violating our rights. How can we say we live in a democracy that respects its citizens when such laws are on the books? How can Nigeria call itself a democracy when individuals like Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu are slaughtered by their own classmates for discussing their faith, and entire churches are gunned down while at worship? I could speak of many more human rights abuses of all sorts. Once the legal dust of this election settles, the yearning of Nigerians for peace and justice will persist, stronger than ever. Our officials can no longer treat governance as business as usual. And I pray that the international community will come to our aid. Individuals like Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, and indeed all Nigerians, desperately need change now more than ever. The post Change on Human Rights Must Come to Nigeria After Election appeared first on Providence.

Kristin Potter, a 38-year-old woman from Pennsylvania, was brutally killed in a dog attack while feeding her neighbor’s canines on ... Read more

On Tuesday, March 27th, 2021, The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, experienced devastating violence. A single female shooter, later identified ... Read more

The Dream of Karabakh, about a woman’s attachment to her village, is rooted in personal memories that cannot be moved, unlike borders

Previously on Providence, I asked whether Russian President Vladimir Putin was correct to smear the West as morally degenerate (or, as he preferred, “Satanic”) as part of his ongoing ideological war against the Occident. Putin’s argument was that contact with Western soil inevitably corrodes the sacred Slavic soul, hence transforming his war of conquest in Ukraine into a morally just battle for the moral salvation of the Ukrainian people.  One way to examine why Putin’s argument is so convincing in Russia, where belief in Orthodox Christianity remains strong, is through the lens of the attention-seeking Ukrainian-born extreme feminist group Femen, best-known today for a series of sick anti-religious stunts like invading French and German Catholic churches in a state of semi-undress before performing obscene mock-abortions of the infant Christ before the altar.  Such literally un-Orthodox tactics – billed dubiously as acts of daring female rebellion – are deliberately calculated to offend Christians of all denominations. This makes it simple for Putin’s propagandists to portray such antinomian agitators as literal agents of the Devil, proving that extended contact with the wanton ways of the West really can corrupt previously innocent Ukrainian souls.  Wicked Witches of the West Femen was founded in Ukraine in 2008. Their all-female forces (they consider themselves a guerrilla band of terroristic ‘sextremists’) initially expressed valid concerns about poor native women being forced into the flourishing post-Soviet sex industry, besides quite correctly foreseeing the danger Vladimir Putin’s ever-more militaristic regime posed towards the freedom of their country.  The specific patriarchs the man-eaters of Femen initially rebelled against were the literal patriarchs (as their national archbishops are known) of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Russian Orthodoxy has long been lavishly funded by the Kremlin and in return has lent its blessing to the State. Its leader, Patriarch Kirill, has explicitly endorsed Putin’s rule and wars alike, even saying dying fighting ‘Satanists’ in Ukraine “washes away all sins” for any Christian soldiers lucky enough to do so.  Femen’s current priest-baiting tricks in Western Europe are not daring at all. Clearly secularist courts repeatedly fail to pass meaningful sentences against the sextremists who disrupt religious services: in 2022, the ECHR upheld one Femen agent’s act of public urination before an altar in a Paris church as a valuable expression of her inalienable right to free speech. In today’s woke West, Femen appear untouchable. Their original antics in Ukraine were nowhere near as risk-free. In 2017, Femen sextremist Anna Allein valiantly disrupted a Russian Orthodox procession through Kiev by draping herself half-naked across a public monument to Prince Vladimir, the esteemed original converter of the Russian world to Christianity. Deriding Patriarch Kirill’s “so-called Christian values”, Femen called the (un)holy march of his priests through the city “inadmissible at the time when our defenders are dying from Russian aggression in Donbas” in the east of the country, where pro-Russian separatists were already fighting to split the region away. “The procession of the Moscow Patriarchate through the streets of Kiev is a ‘silent march’ of the Kremlin aggressor, after which heavy armored tanks may come,” Femen presciently argued.  Yet most did not listen. Why? Perhaps because, by increasingly mixing their reasonable complaints with childish, anti-clerical tantrums, Femen unwisely made the average person in the East automatically regard them as a bunch of student-politics show-offs – or even full-blown Satanists.  When Putin invaded Ukraine for real in February 2022, one Femen sextremist held a “therapeutic action” at Kiev’s central railway station dressed as a female Grim Reaper. Topless and holding a bloody scythe, with her face painted like a skull and a bridal veil atop her long blond hair, she had ‘DON’T PANIC’ daubed across her torso, urging residents not to flee Russia’s incoming missiles as “[being] intimidated equals [being] killed!” (so does being hit by a missile…) All that was necessary for Putin to accomplish his goal of demonizing the West was to share photos of this macabre, seemingly-deranged individual – who looked rather like a literal demon herself.  The Misjudgements of Paris In 2013, several of Femen’s founders fled Ukraine for Paris after being beaten up or seemingly having illegal weapons planted in their offices as a pretext for arrest. They blamed Putin’s secret agents for punishing them after one topless sextremist had accosted Patriarch Kirill with the slogan “Kill Kirill!” in protest against the recent arrest of the Russian feminist punk-protest band Pussy Riot.  One Femen refugee to Paris, Oksana Shachko, a one-time aspirant nun turned creator of satirical anti-religious iconographic art, hanged herself in the French capital in 2018, aged 31. In 2014, she had left Femen, disillusioned by what it had become on foreign soil. “It was not the small, revolutionary, aggressive and courageous movement we created in Ukraine … it became empty,” she said, a mere degenerate parody of its original Ukrainian self. Perhaps this was inevitable. In Ukraine, Femen had encountered enemies actually worth standing up to. In France, the best they could do was to moan self-indulgently against legally impotent Catholic priests.  Once safely harbored within the EU, Femen’s original core of moral seriousness died. Schisms grew between them and their original cross-border inspiration, Pussy Riot. Pussy Riot’s greatest act of public political disobedience came when they famously interrupted a Moscow cathedral service with a discordant ‘punk-prayer’ against Putin in 2012 before being imprisoned, an obvious inspiration for Femen’s own later sacrileges in Western churches. Russian Dolls and Riot Girls Pussy Riot’s 2012 punk-prayer took place in Christ the Savior Cathedral, the church Moscow’s leaders attended to broadcast their alleged religious faith before TV cameras on religious holidays. Thus, Pussy Riot hoped to make “a political gesture to address the Putin government’s merger” with Kirill’s Church. Rather than condemning Christian doctrine, they actually disparaged the Orthodox Church for deviating from it by obeying fallen earthly powers like Putin, not true heavenly authority. Called ‘Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!’, their song had competing verses, some disrespectful when addressing Putin and Patriarch Kirill, some respectful when addressing the Virgin Mary and requesting redemption from the dictator.  Accordingly, some argued Pussy Riot were not blasphemers at all, but Dostoyevskian figures boldly resurrecting the old Russian tradition of Orthodox Holy Fools by leading subversive ‘alternative prayers’ in defiance of corrupt human authorities. In court, Pussy Riot consistently pled no malice against actual believers, claiming to be faithful Orthodox Christians themselves. In 2018, one incarnation of the group actually played a gig at a UK Christian music festival, suggesting their beliefs were genuine, not just a clever defense tactic.  Pussy Riot subsequently refrained from using religious iconography during future protests and explicitly distanced themselves from Femen’s later actions supposedly performed ‘in their name’, as when one topless sextremist cut down a large cross in Kiev using a chainsaw, a senseless provocation Pussy Riot said created no “feelings of solidarity” between the two sisterhoods. Pussy Riot’s public assertion that they “were believers and prayed” was even called “ridiculous” and “disappointing” by the avowedly blasphemous Femen, who thought Christianity inherently sexist.  Femen in Paris became a hollow burlesque of what they had once been in Ukraine, where they faced actual deadly danger, and also of the more truly courageous Pussy Riot in Russia. Therefore, sadly, Putin is correct: in this specific instance, contact with the West really did blacken the souls of a band of once-noble and brave Ukrainian women. But which particular devil in human form had made them all flee Westwards in the first place?  The post Occidental Heroes or Foreign Devils?: The Feminist War for Mother Russia’s Soul appeared first on Providence.

Michael Horne, a 53-year-old man from Kokomo, Indiana, is under arrest for allegedly facilitating the heinous act of child sex ... Read more

33-year-old Jonathan Majors was arrested for allegedly attacking a 30-year-old woman in Manhattan’s Chelsea area in New York. The altercation ... Read more

Jean-Dickens and Abigail Toussaint, both 33, left behind their young son, who will soon turn two years old. The couple ... Read more

Porter Halyburton, Reflections on Captivity: A Tapestry of Stories By a Vietnam War POW — Naval Institute Press, 2023 On October 17, 1965, Lt. (jg) Porter Halyburton, USN, was shot down over North Vietnam. It was his 76th mission. His squadron, VF-84, known as the “Jolly Rogers,” on the USS Independence was part of a strike force ordered to cut off a major supply line between China and Vietnam by destroying a railway and road bridge north of Hanoi. The backseater of an F-4B fighter-bomber, Halyburton and his pilot, Lt. Cdr. Stan Olmstead were tasked with taking out antiaircraft guns protecting the bridge. While enroute to the target, however, groundfire struck Halyburton’s plane. The plane fell and exploded into the mountainside. None of the other US aviators saw an ejection. Halyburton was listed as killed in action. His family mourned. They held a memorial service for him in his hometown. His wife and infant child looked ahead to a future without him. Eighteen months later, information from a clandestine source revealed he was alive and being held captive. He would be held for seven years, three months, and twenty-eight days. Halyburton’s Reflections on Captivity: A Tapestry of Stories By a Vietnam War POW is a collection of fifty short stores about his experiences in a number of detention camps, including the infamous Hanoi Hilton. At an event this week at the US Naval Academy, Lessons of Heroism, hosted by the Naval Institute Press, Porter Halyburton spoke movingly about the profound hardships he and other POWs endured, but also about the surprisingly beautiful elements as well: the deep and abiding friendships, humor, creativity, the courage—the unbelievable courage, the indomitable human spirit, the importance of hope, and the criticality of moral leadership. At both the Naval Academy discussion as well as in his book, Halyburton reflects in depth about how these elements came together in a team of American POWs and how they worked to help each survive and, incredibly, even to flourish. Much of Halyburton’s story feels familiar. I have often written about my preoccupation, many years ago, with the Shoah and with the literature and memoirs that came out of that terrible chapter in the sordid history of man’s inhumanity to man. While different in both obvious and important ways, Halyburton’s POW experience shares characteristics with those who endured the lager system. Among the similarities is the critical realization of the importance of choice, more than merely circumstance, in determining the quality of one’s life—or, when that is impossible, at least the quality of one’s death. One thing made clear: even when our tormentors seemingly have the power to take everything from you, it remains that they cannot, in fact, take everything. They cannot take your faith, for instance, even when they can take nearly every occasion to practice it. They cannot take away your love for your family, even if they can they can rip every member of it away from you. In Halyburton’s case, the Vietnamese authorities could not strip away Halyburton’s determination to flourish, even in the Hanoi Hilton, as honorably as he could. He writes: In the aftermath of long captivity, suffering, and difficult times, I thought a lot about how we were able to survive—and not only to survive but to “Survive with Honor” and to “Return with Honor,” as had become our creed. I tried so hard always to stay active—mentally, physically, and spiritually—and I think this was a very important aspect of my survival. Along with the other POWs, I also made it my daily mission to deny the Vietnamese the control over our lives that they tried to establish through propaganda, indoctrination, degradation, intimidation, fear, deprivation, threats, isolation, boredom, pain, and lies. Stressing the importance of choice, even when most occasions for choosing much of anything at all were taken away, Halyburton recalls how the POWs first line of resistance was to refuse to do or say anything that might harm or shame their country, families, or fellow POWs. The POWs’ defiance was grounded in a sharp recognition of their duty. The US Armed Forces Code of Conduct, established in 1955, guided the conduct and responsibilities of US service members should they be faced with capture or imprisonment during war. Among much else, the Code under which Halyburton was bound hammered into his consciousness the commitment to “die rather than give more [information] than is permitted by [the Code’s] Article V,” which, as is well known, is limited to name, rank, service number, and date of birth. And so, taking a literalist’s approach in the early days, Halyburton would suffer greatly giving no more information than that. Over time, however, reality proved this duty to be essentially impossible to keep and compelled Halyburton to reassess his understanding of the real nature of his duty. In response to the POWs’ defiance the Vietnamese proved capable of cruelty beyond Halyburton’s imagination that would bring detainees to their limits. And so, in what seemed like a violation of the Code, the POWs formed a second line of defense. “When [your] limit was reached,” Halyburton writes, “and you had to do or say something, the “Second Line” reminded you that there was usually something that you could do in order to render their tactics useless in turning public opinion against the war, especially in America. Ultimately, torture and mistreatment did not serve them well.” Two things to note here. First, even giving useless information suggested to Halyburton a betrayal of the Code. Throughout Reflections in Captivity, Halyburton dwells on this inability—if only sometimes seeming inability—to adhere to one’s sense of duty. He wrestles with the idea that the moral life is not always able to be lived in strict compliance with the literal letter of one’s duty or a literal interpretation of moral rules. There is a grey zone, between strict compliance and, on the other extreme, dereliction of duty—or, as is often the case, moral cowardice. It is in this grey zone that much of life—including the moral life—is lived. The poles that demarcate the grey zone are important to grasp, for actions within the grey zone do not signal an actual betrayal of the duty or moral rule. Rather, they are efforts to manifest the moral rule or duty within the limits of reality. They are efforts to follow the rule as closely as possible. This was a critical realization for Halyburton, as it ought to be for all of us. Much of the moral life is mired in moral conflict—circumstances in which one or more moral goods are in tension and in which performing one duty seems to violate another duty. How we work that out without becoming silly idealists or jaundiced cynics is tricky. The second thing to note comes out of my added emphasis, above, to the word “usually.” Halyburton’s use of the word suggests that it was not, in fact, always possible to do something that rendered the Vietnamese tactics useless. Sometimes, in fact, the Americans said or did things they did not want to do or say. These genuine breaks with moral responsibility or duty hurt. It didn’t matter to the POWs that their breaking under torment was understandable. They still felt the shame. It’s here that Halyburton highlights the criticality of good moral leadership. Admiral James Stockdale was part of a cohort of exemplary moral leaders that helped shape the moral fiber of the POW community in Hanoi. In an earthy and oft’ told anecdote, Stockdale once consoled a POW who had broken under torture. “There are no virgins here,” Stockdale reassured him. Nobody, Stockdale implied, is pure. We all fail. Stockdale simultaneously acknowledged both the POW’s moral failure and he offered absolution. Both were critical in dealing with the moral shortcomings in the POW experience. Both are critical for dealing with them now. Naturally, Halyburton’s long imprisonment took much from him. Life–and death–continued in the outside world. While in captivity he lost his grandparents with whom he had grown up. He lost his mother too. He also lost much of his daughter’s childhood as well. Dabney was five days old when Halyburton deployed for Vietnam. He would not see her again in any way until the end of 1969 when the Vietnamese finally permitted a package from home to actually be given to Halyburton. Included in that much-pilfered parcel was a picture of his wife and daughter. By then she was almost five years old. While overwhelming, the picture reminded Halyburton of everything he had to live for. In response, he wrote the following poem: The Three of Us Yesterday on meeting you, Hoping without knowing you, Knowing without asking you, Loving without telling you. . The young and misty two of us, Sharing each the best of us, Accepting too the worst of us, And we so good for both of us. . And as for me the faulty one, The wild and hungry needy one, To spend my life in search of one, And finding you the perfect one. . And so we shared our pastel days, Our soft and glowing magic days, And you with child within those days, And then our few but perfect days. . Now two of you to wait for me, To love, to hope, to pray for me, And I still feel you part of me, Though you and she so far from me. . The future still so bright for us, For you, for me, for three of us, And she the best of each of us, Will fill the lives of both of us. . This calls to mind holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s frequent reference to the Nietzschean aphorism, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” At the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, on the day that Halyburton was finally released, he overheard other Americans plotting revenge on their captors. Porter relates how he, instead, turned back to look at the prison gates and said, “I forgive you.” He really appeared to actually mean it. He recalled, “all that hatred, all that armor, fell away.” The hatred had, during his captivity, been a mechanism for survival. It was a form of defense. “Hatred,” Halyburton insisted, “had become an armor against the Vietnamese.” Now, it seemed, perhaps, merely a burden. It had taken hold and had a power over them. Halyburton insisted, “I was not going to take that home. These people were never going to adversely affect my life again.” That pronouncement of forgiveness, Halyburton asserted, “was the most liberating thing I ever did.” In a way that his mere physical release could never have accomplished, Halyburton was no longer a captive of the Vietnamese. And that, too, was a choice. The post Reflections On Captivity (And Freedom): A Review appeared first on Providence.

For Christians, Lent is a forty-day period of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving – a purgatorial preparation for the joy of Easter. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday with the words of Genesis 3:19, “Remember, O man, that thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return,” a reminder of human mortality. It concludes with Holy Week, the triumphal liturgical commemoration of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  Lent is also a time to remember the suffering of Our Lord, and in remembering to strive to become more Christlike. The spiritual rigors of Lent are meant to train the Christian to better serve the Kingdom of God in the face of suffering.  Beyond the forty days preceding Easter, there is a sense in which a Christian’s faith can always be a “Lenten” practice of penance. Roman Catholic writer Dwight Longenecker, for instance, once described the poet T.S. Eliot’s anguished life as a “long Lent” in which he drew “back from the love and happiness he longed for out of a mixture of guilt for the harm he had inflicted on” his loved ones. For ten years, Eliot maintained a life of penance to atone for his sins. Another great Christian writer, Whittaker Chambers, endured a “long Lent” of his own at the height of the Cold War. In the midst of his immense suffering, Chambers turned to the Christian Realism of the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as a guide through his penance. Christian Realism presented an ethical and theological framework for Chambers to understand his Lenten suffering – and it can help Christians today understand their walk in faith, too. In his youth, Chambers joined the Communist Party because he thought revolution alone could redeem the wretched of the earth. He turned spy for the Soviet Union in the hopes of serving the revolution, only to discover too late that the Soviet Union was the cause of the greatest human suffering inflicted on the 20th century. The knowledge of his complicity in totalitarian horror left Chambers consumed with guilt, and especially after becoming an informant on his old communist friend, Alger Hiss, Chambers felt intense spiritual pain. In becoming anti-communist, Chambers endured a life of penance worthy of a true saint. Six months before the infamous Hiss hearings began in Congress, Chambers wrote a cover story titled “Religion: Faith for a Lenten Age” for TIME Magazine about Niebuhr. “In many ways,” Chambers says in his brilliant memoir Witness, “the essay was a statement of my own religious faith at the time.” It was his “indictment of the modern mind,” and a plea with his fellow Americans to recover their faith during a period of Cold War crisis. Chambers begins the essay with an anecdote of a small girl in Manhattan on Ash Wednesday asking her mother about the ashen cross on a man’s forehead. For him, this small vignette illustrates a major problem – theology had become inaccessible to many Americans, just when they needed it most. Rather than a transformational relationship with God, Chambers says, religion in America had become little more than a mere obligation to custom. “Among millions of Christians,” he laments, “religion itself is little more than a worthy mental habit, socially manifested in church attendance often more sporadic and much less disturbing than regular visits to the dentist.”  And even when Americans sporadically attend church services, Chambers worries that they were being fed a false gospel of liberal optimism. Niebuhr’s Christian Realism, by contrast, is “the old-time religion put through the intellectual wringer” according to Chambers. He says, “It is a reexamination of orthodoxy for an age dominated by such trends as rationalism, liberalism, Marxism, fascism, idealism, and the idea of progress.” Niebuhr’s reexamination began with a true account of human nature. “Against the easy conscience,” Chambers writes, “Dr. Niebuhr asserted: man is by the nature of his creation sinful; at the height of man’s perfection there is always the possibility of evil. Against easy optimism, he asserted that life is inevitably tragic. Says Niebuhr: ‘Mankind is living in a Lenten age.’” By affirming the old verities about sin and applying them to contemporary issues, Niebuhr “restored to Protestantism a Christian virility,” Chambers writes, “For, in the name of courage, which men have always rightly esteemed in one another as the indispensable virtue, he summons Protestants to seek truth.” In no small part, Chambers sympathized with Niebuhr’s Christian Realist admonition to seek truth because it resembled his personal quest for God. After breaking with the Communists, Chambers wrote that he embarked on a kind of pursuit of religious truth: I sought a congregation in which I could worship God… I had not changed from secular to religious faith in order to tolerate a formless goodwill vaguely tinctured with rationalized theology and social uplift. I was not seeking ethics; I was seeking God. My need was to be a practicing Christian in the same sense that I had been a practicing Communist. I was seeking a community of worship in which a daily mysticism (for I hold that God cannot be known in any other way) would be disciplined and fortified by an orderly, and even practical, spirit and habit of life and mind. Chambers eventually found that “daily mysticism” in the Society of Friends. Despite his opposition to pacifism, he found within the Quaker tradition the spiritual resources he needed to stand as one of the twentieth century’s great Christian witnesses.  The Soviet Union may have fallen, and the Nazi menace may have been defeated, but the great Christian Realist insight is that human nature remains unchanged. The world will always be confronted by the crisis of human sinfulness. During this season of penitence, then, Christians should turn to the wisdom of great writers such as Whittaker Chambers and great theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr. They remind us that, on this side of the Second Coming, mankind will always be living in a Lenten Age. The post Whittaker Chambers’ Lenten Faith appeared first on Providence.

For all the criticism of America’s pop culture, there are moments that sometimes move America to be the best version of itself. One of those moments came during this year’s Academy Awards with a moving, tearful speech by former- child-actor-turned-stage-hand-turned-actor, Ke Huy Quan. Quan won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the highly unusual yet entertaining film, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, about a Chinese immigrant family facing financial and relational hardships that find themselves sucked into countless alternate universes and must find a way out of their predicament. Quan’s speech was not political in the slightest. Still, in a small way, his speech is a great example of what America ought to aspire to. While less than three minutes long, it exudes gratitude, demonstrates the virtues of hard work and the importance of delayed gratification, celebrates family, and pays tribute to lifelong friends. In short, it is everything classically liberal conservatives have celebrated for centuries. Quan’s speech was tearful, joyful, and totally unpretentious in tone: Oh, my God!  Thank you! My mom is 84 years old and she’s at home watching. Mom, I just want an Oscar! My journey started on a boat. I spent a year in a refugee camp, and somehow I ended up here, on Hollywood’s biggest stage. They say stories like this only happen in the movies. I cannot believe it’s happening to me. This is the American Dream. Thank you so much. Thank you so much to the Academy for this honor of a lifetime. Thank you to my mom for the sacrifices she made to get me here. To my little brother, David, who calls me every day just to remind me to take good care of myself, I love you, brother. Thank you to Kendall for all your support and everything you’ve done. Thank you to A24, to Daniels, Jonathan, Jamie, Michelle, and my Goonies brother for life, Jeff Cohen. I owe everything to the love of my life, my wife, Echo, who month after month, year after year for 20 years told me that one day my time will come. Dreams are something you have to believe in. I almost gave up on mine. To all of you out there, please keep your dreams alive. Thank you. Thank you so much for welcoming me back. I love you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Beyond the tone, the context adds a lot. Quan, a Vietnam-born ethnically Chinese American who, as he alluded to in his speech, came to America as a refugee when he was seven, was a child star in such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies, but as he grew found the market for Asian actors lacking. He went to film school, still desiring to be an actor, but found himself in behind-the-scenes jobs like stunt coordinator and assistant director, among other unglamorous roles in the industry.  Quan was inspired by the success of 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians to try again. Amazingly, in his first major role in over 30 years, he knocked it out of the park and won an Academy Award. But rather than “I told you so,” or scolding Hollywood for having too few parts for Asian Americans (something he nonetheless believes is true), the spirit of gratitude seems to exude from everything he does. There’s no sense of entitlement for his talent, no sense of bitterness for the decades of less glamorous work, but a sense of profound joy at his opportunities. By my reading, every line in his speech is about gratitude. Yural Levin says, “Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it,” and Quan is an excellent example. He wants to improve both his own lot and the lot of Asian Americans in Hollywood, but also wants to build, not tear down, opportunities, for others. Furthermore, the 20-year dry spell, in Quan’s telling, doesn’t seem to be about a lost opportunity or a regret about what could have been. Rather, it’s about being willing to put in hard work so that “one day my time will come.” While he is quite different from the Hollywood establishment, both in career trajectory and manner, he loves Hollywood without a hint of resentment. He celebrates his director, his co-stars, current and former, his production company, and “Hollywood’s biggest stage.” He loves his industry. Again, such gratitude. While he is the embodiment of the American Dream, Quan’s understanding of that dream isn’t about money or status. Instead, it embodies all the other aspects of his life: his modest circumstances, fiercely supportive family, patience, and gratitude for the right opportunity that finally came. Modern conservatives don’t celebrate immigration the way they should, but that’s not always been the case. Indeed, Quan’s immigration story is one straight out of Ronald Reagan’s “Shining City on a Hill” address which celebrated stories like Quan’s: The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck and stood up and called out to him. He yelled, “Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.”  A small moment with a big meaning, a moment the sailor, who wrote it in a letter, couldn’t get out of his mind. And when I saw it, neither could I. One of those refugees from Indochina that made it to America was Quan. And he made good on the promise that is America; not its wealth and power, but its gratitude, acceptance, vital institutions, and opportunities to use talent to make your fellow man’s life better. I think it’ll take Americans a few weeks, or hopefully longer, to get Quan out of their minds.  The post Ke Huy Quan: Actor, Immigrant, American appeared first on Providence.

How should Christian Realism reflect on the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War’s start?  The answer is exasperatingly complex. Conventional wisdom unhesitatingly denounces nearly every aspect of the war as a calamity.  Every war is a calamity, but Iraq, it is argued, was an avoidable calamity. Reinhold Niebuhr, chief architect of 20th century Christian Realism, famously opposed the Vietnam War. Almost certainly he would have opposed the Iraq War.  In a 1966 New Republic interview he explained: There is obviously some truth in the argument that if we withdraw from Vietnam, other Asian nations, particularly Thailand, Malaysia and perhaps the Philippines, will not be safe against Chinese expansion. Our military presence is obviously necessary in Asia. But it was certainly an error of inadvertence to become involved in South Vietnam by gradually increasing commitments, so that our prestige is involved in the pretense that we are helping a small nation to preserve its independence. There are indications that this small sliver of a nation with a peasant culture is incapable of either the democracy or integral nationhood which our dogmas attribute to it. Presumably Niebuhr likewise would call Iraq “incapable of either democracy or integral nationhood,” therefore not meriting U.S. prestige and military force.  Note he didn’t oppose the Vietnam War because he had any illusions that South Vietnam would fare better under domination by North Vietnam.  He simply found the project of saving and democratizing South Vietnam implausible. In that same interview in which Niebuhr discussed his opposition to the Vietnam War, the reporter quoted from his most famous book The Irony of American History: If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history, but by hatred and vainglory. In response, Niebuhr clarified that his quote referred to the “irresponsible neutralism to which we were addicted after the First World War and which vaingloriously thought we would be preserved as a museum piece of pure democracy, while other nations were enslaved by Nazism.”  He noted “Our power had cured us of irresponsible neutralism, but not of self-righteousness.” No doubt Niebuhr would have deemed the crusade to liberate and democratize Iraq a bout of national “self-righteousness.” But he would have avoided the naivete suffusing much of the war critique then and now.  He would not have disputed that Saddam Hussein murdered and tortured many thousands, fomented war and regional disruption, and was a dangerous enemy of the United States. Nor would Niebuhr dispute that the U.S. led containment of Saddam Hussein by 2003 was crumbling.  The sanctions were increasingly ineffectual and exploited by the dictator for his own enrichment while his people hovered on destitution.  The U.S. troop presence in Saudi Arabia and no-fly zones over much of Iraq were not indefinitely sustainable.  U.S. vulnerability to terror strikes by even non-state actors, which on 9-11 killed thousands and shut down much of the U.S. economy, left little room for error.  The American public, understandably, wanted an aggressive stance against all supporters of international terror.   Niebuhr would have understood these conditions but likely would have counseled more indirect measures than direct invasion and occupation of Iraq.  In his New Republic interview, he explained his support for U.S. entry into World War was because “Nazism’s military nationalism threatened the moral substance of Western culture, the Jews with extinction, and non-German continental nations with slavery. None of these issues is involved in a civil war between two portions of a partitioned nation, one Communist and the other non-Communist.”  He defended his support of the Korean War by noting it “was undertaken under United Nations auspices.”    Likely Niebuhr would not have been surprised that the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein was achieved relatively easily, but the major problems emerged from the occupation, for which the U.S. did not properly prepare.  Unlike Germany and Japan, which the U.S. occupied and transformed more successfully, Iraq was an artificial nation of distinct nationalities, cobbled together by force.  Yet Iraq survives today, arguably strengthened by its fight against ISIS, with an elected government, amid fractious politics and corruption. The current regime, unlike Saddam Hussein’s, does not murder and torture many thousands, or invade neighboring countries. About two thousand U.S. troops remain, although not in direct combat roles. If Niebuhr were alive today, maybe he would argue that the U.S. should sustain what there is in Iraq, with no illusions about its potentialities. He might warn against exaggerated lessons from Iraq that imagine that U.S. can pursue a detached and “irresponsible neutralism” and stand alone as a “museum piece of pure democracy.” A statecraft dreaming that a great nation can be in the world but not of it is both hubristic and self-righteous, as Niebuhr would surely agree.  So too is imagining a nation, great or small, can be immune to human passions, whether fearful or idealistic, in 2003 or 2023. The post Christian Realism & the Iraq War appeared first on Providence.

According to the latest reports, Australian native Mr. Julian Assange is currently waging an increasingly desperate legal struggle to prevent rendition from British to American custody, where he awaits in the Eastern District of Virginia United States of America v. Julian Paul Assange, an 18-count indictment relying upon the rarely invoked Espionage Act of 1917. Assange stands accused of soliciting a vast array of classified US government documents with malice aforethought from PFC Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning in 2010 and publishing them on WikiLeaks, the trove in question mainly consisting of about ninety thousand Afghan and four hundred thousand Iraq war activity reports, eight hundred Guantanamo Bay detainee reports, and two hundred and fifty thousand State Department cables. Assange does not maintain his innocence, but his fiercely loyal international following maintain his conformity to the norms of press freedom. Amid the current quiet but anticipatory interval, what preliminary opinion might be passed upon this complex and protracted episode from the War on Terror?  Famously resident for seven years (2012-19) within the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange has been the subject of so great a cloud of representation and misrepresentation that any authentic assessment ought to concentrate upon the life and doctrine of the man himself. Self-styled the “editor” of WikiLeaks (2006-), a website that displays purloined documents across the intelligence, global economy, international politics, corporations, government, and war and military spaces, two books published prior to his flight from the British authorities contain the outlines of his doctrine. First, Assange served as research assistant, although credited as co-author of Suelette Dreyfus’ Underground ([1997] 2012), an ethnography of various hackers with call signs like Anthrax, Electron, or Parmaster, and their indirect confrontations at the outset of the internet with NASA, the Defense Department, or the Australian police. His own voice and views become much more apparent however in Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (2012), which takes the form of sustained dialogues with erstwhile accomplices Jacob Applebaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmerman in overall development of the Assange thesis of “privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful” (7). Although which persons or groups or nations fall into either category remains unspecified, an extreme anxiety over the prospect of limitless state and corporate surveillance is communicated. “If you buy something from your next-door neighbor with your Visa card,” observes Assange, “everybody knows” (95). The internet, the major corporations, the United States, the CIA, and the major tech conglomerates interchangeably play the puppet master and the marionettes in cascading conversation drenched in paranoia but lacking in original research, hard evidence, or critical reflection. “Positive trajectory,” Assange continues, “would mean the inability of neo-totalitarian states to arise in practice because of the free movement of information, the ability for people to speak to each other privately and conspire against such tendencies, and the ability for micro-capital to move without control away from such places which are inhospitable to human beings” (158). He concludes, in a valediction shortly before fleeing to the embassy, “the most probable scenario for the future [is]: an extremely confining, homogenized, postmodern transnational totalitarian structure with incredible complexities, absurdities, and debasements” (159).  Over the years Assange has been variously characterized as a journalist, a spy, a revolutionary, an activist, and most recently and invidiously as a Russian agent, and his ideas as left-libertarian, anti-imperialist, liberationist, and oxymoronically as both pro- and anti-technology. His words and actions most closely align however with high Victorian and Edwardian anarchism, with the brutalist doctrine and violent praxis of the abolition of the state which ran amok throughout the major cities of Europe, Britain, and America prior to the outbreak of the Great War, and which was memorably dramatized in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907). In God and the State (Dieu et l’état, 1883), the most uncompromising contemporary formulation, Michael Bakunin summarizes, “In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage…This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists” (35). Assange appears to subscribe to this rejection of the foundational liberal notion of democratic self-determination militating against the abuse of power. In “Anarchism: What it Really Stands For” (1911), Romanov Jewish-American émigré and revolutionary Emma Goldman defines it thus: “The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.” Self-described cypherpunks such as Assange who sometimes need a friendly reminder to bathe, to shave, or to put on fresh linen frequently espouse a similar view. Peter Kropotkin’s communal anarchism emphasizing agrarian reciprocity was also influential during the period, as was the spiritualism of Tolstoy. But the transnational disorders occasioned by such doctrines were considerable, with anarchist inspired assassinations including those of Empress Elisabeth “Sissi” of Austria in Geneva in 1898 and of President McKinley in Buffalo in 1901. Marius Jacob embarked upon a career of burglaries across France that made him modern history’s most distinguished thief, while none other than Home Secretary Winston Churchill helped put down an anarchist rising in the Sidney Street siege of 1911. These intermittent attempts at anarchist insurgency came to a temporary end when the newly installed Bolshevik government in Moscow, having vanquished all its enemies en route to the declaration of the Soviet Union by October, 1917, crushed the anarchist naval mutiny of the Kronstadt fortress in 1921, a decisive political outcome that would herald at least seven decades of subjection of the bloodied, tattered, and trampled upon black banner to the fluttering, world-conquering red.   Assuming Mr. Assange stands trial, the prosecution shall not likely concentrate upon the defendant’s ideological orientation. But the pursuit of truth involves much larger questions than the mere punishment of crime, and the optimal framing of the Julian Assange saga as one of international neo-anarchist revolution furnishes significant conceptual clarity. Thomas Hobbes, the greatest theoretical opponent of this tendency, warns against its concomitant relativism in On Human Nature (2008 [1640]: 44) thus: “Every man, for his own part, calleth that which pleaseth, and is delightful to himself, GOOD; and that EVIL which displeaseth him.”   The post The Anarchism of Julian Assange appeared first on Providence.

In the early morning hours of October 3, 1935, Italian forces in Eritrea and Somalia crossed into Ethiopia, launching a war of aggression to extend Benito Mussolini’s imperial ambitions in East Africa. As a consequence of the invasion, Italy faced significant economic sanctions from the League of Nations, not unlike the international response to Russia’s imperialistic aggression against Ukraine almost a century later. Ethiopia, however, fell the following year and faced Italian occupation until 1941. As Nicholas Mulder recounts in his 2022 book, The Economic Weapon, the League’s sanctions on Mussolini’s Italy were both the most ambitious attempt to implement multilateral economic sanctions on an aggressor since World War I and the culmination of two decades of work by internationalists in Europe and the United States to develop economic sanctions as a weapon to deter aggression.  The League’s economic campaign against Italy failed to save Ethiopia or deter a revanchist Germany from subjugating its neighbors. However, one year into the war in Ukraine, amid intensifying U.S. debates about how to deter an invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army, Mulder’s book contains important historical lessons for the geopolitical challenges facing the United States and its allies in the coming decade.  The use of economic sanctions in the interwar period demonstrated that sanctions campaigns are only as effective as their implementation and scope. The details—including participating states, affected economic activities, and economic dependencies between participating states and the target—do matter. Sanctions against one aggressor can also incentivize states to reorder their economic policies to pursue autarky and make themselves less vulnerable to future international sanctions, as Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany did after the League sanctioned Italy. Finally, the original conception of the “economic weapon” included both sanctioning aggressors and provisioning economic aid to victims of aggression and allies facing economic pain from participating in the sanctions campaign. Efforts to influence or constrain the behavior of China and Russia through economic means must keep these lessons front of mind or risk failing to achieve their aims over the short and long term. A Race Against Time The League’s sanctions against Italy were an unprecedented attempt by an international coalition in peacetime to utilize economic tools to deter and punish an act of aggression by a great power. As Mulder highlights, France, the United Kingdom, and other members of the League threatened Mussolini with wide-ranging economic sanctions if he invaded Ethiopia. After Italy attacked despite these threats, the League followed through with 52 member states imposing an arms embargo, a freeze on financial relations with Italy, an import embargo, and other measures. The goal was to deprive Italy of arms and foreign exchange earnings and eventually prevent Mussolini from supplying his army. However, the sanctions campaign did not include an oil embargo, and the war did not last long enough for the League’s sanctions to reach full effect. The sanctions were hamstrung by America’s non-participation and their focus on undermining Italy’s finances as opposed to commodity access. In 1935, the United States accounted for the majority of global oil production. Without its support, the League could not prevent Italy from obtaining foreign exchange and fuel from American trade. Mulder notes that after the war, British officials concluded that Italy avoided financial catastrophe by maintaining access to key commodities and concluding the war in Ethiopia before foreign reserves ran out. This dynamic has important parallels to the current sanctions campaign against Russia. In 2022, Moscow’s oil products exports increased compared to 2021 despite Western sanctions, providing a foreign exchange lifeline that has given the Central Bank of Russia the ability to blunt some of the sanctions. This does not mean Russia will not suffer severe long-term consequences; restrictions on technology transfers, new efforts to cap the price of Russian energy exports, and continued financial sanctions could leave Putin’s regime unable to sustain a protracted war in the future. Still, these measures failed to deter or constrain Russia’s war machine in a meaningful way during the crucial early months of the conflict. Efforts by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany to make themselves less vulnerable to sanctions following the League campaign against Italy foreshadow how China could respond to the Russo-Ukrainian War. While League sanctions did not cripple Italy’s economy, they still inflicted significant damage. Mulder details how Berlin and Tokyo concluded from observing the League’s sanctions against Italy that securing blockade-proof access to strategically important commodities was necessary for national survival. To that end, Hitler launched his Four-Year-Plan in 1936 to prepare Germany economically for war, with blockade resilience playing a major role. Japan’s search for secure sources of raw materials and an escalating Sino-Japanese War contributed to the 1941 decision to attack the United States and conquer the Western Pacific. This history and today’s Western response to Russian aggression is likely to give new urgency to China’s ongoing efforts to attain self-sufficiency in advanced technology and shore up resource security with its Belt and Road Initiative. Finally, wielding the “economic weapon” against an aggressor successfully requires both punitive sanctions as well as economic aid. As Mulder points out, the League did not provide Ethiopia with the material assistance necessary to sustain its resistance against Italy. In contrast, the United States and its allies have provided Kyiv with significant military and economic assistance to hold off Russia. However, prior to Putin’s invasion, the West was insufficiently prepared to provide aid to nations highly dependent on Russian energy, thus delaying the imposition of sanctions on Russia’s energy sector and risking political support in several key European states. Can Economic Sanctions Help Deter China in the 2020s? As U.S. policymakers consider the role of economic policy in deterring Chinese aggression against Taiwan, they should heed the examples in The Economic Weapon and real-time lessons from Western sanctions against Putin’s Russia. The successful use of economic tools will require significant planning and coordination between the United States and its allies, both in the Indo-Pacific and Europe. Otherwise, a conflict could be over or too far advanced for sanctions to have an impact by the time they are developed and put into effect. The effectiveness of American sanctions would be determined not only by planning across the executive and legislative branches but also by long-term trends in U.S.-China economic ties. To maintain the strategic value of potential sanctions against China, policymakers should heed the recent admonition by Matt Pottinger, Matthew Johnson, and David Feith to shape economic ties between the United States and its allies with China to “maintain a favorable balance of dependence in a wide range of areas,” thus making any areas economic interdependence a strength, not a weakness. Washington must balance between stymieing Beijing’s technological and economic ambitions while preserving its ability to use key dependencies as leverage to deter war.  Economic resilience among allies in the Indo-Pacific will also be essential for deterring China from an invasion of Taiwan. A U.S.-led collective resilience bloc could leverage China’s trade dependencies and the bloc’s economic strength to resist Chinese economic coercion in peace and war while also blunting the blowback effects of any sanctions campaign against China. Like in the interwar period, these elements—well-designed and comprehensive sanctions planned in advance, favorable economic dependencies with a potential adversary, and coordinated multilateral economic resilience—will all bear on the success or failure of future efforts to wield the “economic weapon.” But a close reading of the history laid out by Mulder makes clear that economic measures alone are unlikely to deter a determined aggressor. Nonetheless, this book is an important read for understanding how great power competition and conflict could unfold in this era. The post Relearning the Economic Lessons of Great Power Conflict appeared first on Providence.

Marzo de 2023 será recordado como el mes en que la guerra del régimen de Nicaragua contra la Iglesia Católica se radicalizó. Durante años, incluso cuando el régimen brutal de Daniel Ortega y Rosario Murillo tomaba medidas cada vez más drásticas para perseguir a sacerdotes y someter a fieles, el Papa y sus representantes buscaron minimizar el conflicto y adaptarse al régimen. Pese a esto, la sentencia contra Monseñor Rolando Álvarez a 26 años de presión fue la gota que derramó el vaso.  Incapaz de permanecer callado por más tiempo, el 10 de marzo el Papa Francisco concedió una extraordinaria entrevista en la que condenó públicamente al régimen como “hitleriano”, llamando a sus líderes mentalmente inestables y groseros. El Sumo Pontífice también se pronunció en favor de la liberación del Obispo Álvarez, quien se negó a aceptar el exilio forzado con más de 220 presos políticos, ahora desterrados de Nicaragua, despojados de sus pertenencias y su ciudadanía. La respuesta de la dictadura de Ortega fue rápida e intransigente. El régimen cerró la misión diplomática de Nicaragua en el Vaticano y exigió a la Santa Sede reciprocidad. Es un punto de inflexión histórico; la última vez que una nación latinoamericana rompió relaciones con el Vaticano fue en 1861. Ni las dictaduras de Cuba o Venezuela han dado un paso tan radical. La presión se ha estado acumulando desde 2018, cuando las protestas cívicas contra el régimen fueron reprimidas violentamente. Cientos fueron asesinados por las fuerzas de seguridad que tenían órdenes de disparar a matar. A medida que las diferentes instituciones nacionales fueron cooptadas o capturadas directamente por el régimen de Ortega-Murillo, la iglesia permaneció firme e independiente, pese a la intensificación de la campaña de intimidación.  En marzo de 2022, la expulsión del Nuncio Apostólico Waldemar Sommertag, el Embajador del Papa, desató una nueva fase de acciones policiales y paramilitares contra líderes eclesiásticos, laicos, feligreses e incluso contra sus templos. Hasta finales de 2022 fueron documentados cerca de 400 actos violentos contra la iglesia. En Nicaragua, una nación altamente religiosa, la situación está llegando al nivel de lo absurdo. A medida que se acerca la Semana Santa, que junto con la Navidad es una de las fechas más importante en el calendario litúrgico católico, el régimen de Ortega-Murillo ha prohibido las tradicionales y apolíticas procesiones de Cuaresma, que marcan públicamente esta temporada. Estas celebraciones jamás habían sido ilegalizadas. Hasta ahora.  Pero esto es, en última instancia, un enfoque contraproducente. Más que atacar a la jerarquía católica, como pretende el régimen, prohibir la manifestación de la fe es realmente un ataque a todos los creyentes nicaragüenses, incluidos los evangélicos protestantes, que durante años han ido ganando terreno en Centroamérica. Ortega camina sobre la cuerda floja; otros dictadores han permitido expresiones de fe para apaciguar las preocupaciones sociales y políticas. Incluso la mayoría de los sandinistas no parecen estar muy contentos con estas últimas maniobras. La dictadura está cada vez más aislada, sus ataques la ponen en compañía de países como China y Corea del Norte. Incluso sus compañeros dictadores de América Latina no están dispuestos a unirse a Ortega y Murillo en su cruzada equivocada contra el primer Papa latinoamericano. La valoración de numerosos observadores es que el régimen está cada vez más fuera de control. El Congreso de los Estados Unidos está organizando audiencias para abordar esta preocupante situación. Mientras tanto, un Ortega aislado y enfurecido, sigue reprimiendo a sus adversarios, aumentando dramáticamente el riesgo de aquellos encarcelados, incluido el Obispo Álvarez. Monseñor Silvio Báez, Obispo Auxiliar de Managua en el exilio, lo ha expresado así: “Temo que la dictadura se ensañe más contra él (Monseñor Álvarez). Ruego a la comunidad internacional que presione más al régimen exigiendo que lo libere de inmediato”. La presión internacional significativa, sostenida y coordinada, es esencial para frenar los abusos del régimen. ¿Qué hay que hacer? Varias cosas, incluyendo una campaña de rechazo internacional a la persecución de los creyentes nicaragüenses, liderada por organismos humanitarios como Naciones Unidas, Cruz Roja y la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos. Curiosamente, Nicaragua mantiene privilegios de libre comercio con los Estados Unidos y otros países en América Central, incluida la República Dominicana. Bajo ninguna circunstancia Washington debería considerar extender los privilegios comerciales del CAFTA a una dictadura como la de Ortega y no hay razón por la que Managua siga cosechando los beneficios de este acuerdo, sin haber dado antes señales claras de retornar a la senda de la democracia. El régimen también disfruta de acceso al sistema financiero mundial, incluidos préstamos en condiciones favorables de instituciones como el Banco Mundial, el FMI y el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. Lo más escandaloso es que el Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica (BCIE), sigue ofreciendo un significativo financiamiento a la economía nicaragüense, fondos que el régimen utiliza para mejorar su posicionamiento y recrudecer el control social.  Estados Unidos no es miembro del BCIE, pero ha brindado, a través de la Corporación Financiera de Desarrollo y otros vehículos, un apoyo significativo que el banco utiliza para proyectos regionales bajo el actual presidente, Dante Mossi. Taiwán es un financiador aún más grande de esta institución, una situación cada vez más insostenible ya que un país centroamericano tras otro ha cambiado el reconocimiento de Taipéi por Beijing. En resumen. El dinero es fungible. El régimen de Nicaragua se ha radicalizado. Ya es hora de considerar un camino diferente. The post <strong>Nicaragua recrudece persecución religiosa</strong> appeared first on Providence.