Two Very Different Bush Presidencies

Having served in the administrations of both Presidents Bush, I can assure you that those two administrations could not be more different. Many see the former as a failed presidency because it was rejected after one term. However, on most issues it was guided by solid conservative principle. Many of its most senior appointees were held over from the Reagan administration, and one had confidence that seasoned professionals were in charge. They were, for the most part, ladies and gentlemen who loved America, respected the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, made sacrifices to serve, had a spirit of servant leadership, class, good manners and human decency. In the campaign of 1992, when many of us wished the President would tell the American people what he knew about the personal life of Bill Clinton, a sense of gentlemanly decorum prevented him from doing so.

In the vicious and coordinated attacks on Scott McClellan, we see the stark contrast between the father and the son and their two administrations. In the most senior positions of this administration is a cabal of arrogant and ruthless Texans whose highest value is power. They are not "movement conservatives," as so many in the senior Bush administration had been. They simply use conservative rhetoric to "secure the base." Those of us who actually believed the rhetoric and believed that this White House cares about such things as parental rights and school choice, were quickly disabused of any such notions.

In this Bush White House, the Constitution, law and civility take a back seat to the need to attain and wield power. McClellan's claims that there is a 24/7 campaign mode is absolutely correct. Even the Secretary's Regional Representatives in the U. S. Department of Education were told in 2003 that all of their activities, information gathering and weekly reports were to be done for the benefit of the 2004 presidential campaign.

The question is asked as to why McClellan did not speak up and raise his concerns with more senior White House staff in policy meetings; but this administration is not one that values independent thought. McClellan surely knew that to question in any way would raise questions about his loyalty, put him outside the circle, and on a plane back to Texas.

The bitter experience of this failed administration should be a reminder to conservatives that settling for the lesser of two evils yields evil. If this Administration, which gave lip service to conservative ideals, has presided over the largest growth in government and government spending since the Great Society, has run roughshod over civil liberties, has disregarded the Constitution, the division of federal power and states' rights, and has made preemptive global warfare our foreign policy, what should we expect from a Republican candidate who doesn't even bother to speak as a conservative?

Perhaps, as Pat Buchanan suggests in the following column, the good news is President Bush just doesn't matter any more.

Is Bush Becoming Irrelevant?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

After losing both houses of Congress in the 1994 election, Bill Clinton expostulated: The president of the United States is not irrelevant!

On learning his trusted aide from Texas Scott McClellan has denounced as an “unnecessary war” the same Iraq war McClellan defended from the White House podium, George Bush must feel as Clinton did.

The synchronized savagery of the attacks on McClellan as turncoat suggests he drew blood. For what he has done is offer confirmation to the president’s war critics, from within the White House inner circle, that Bush’s motive in going to war was not a clear and present danger of attack by Iraq with weapons of mass destruction, but to advance a Bush crusade to impose democracy on the Middle East.

Neoconservative ideology, not U.S. national interests, McClellan is saying, motivated Bush to launch one of the longest and most divisive wars in U.S. history.

When loyalists defect and seek to profit from that defection, it is usually a sign of a failing presidency. And, indeed, events suggest that history is passing Bush by.

Despite the administration’s designation of Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, and of Syria and Iran as state sponsors of terror with whom we do not negotiate, America’s clients are ignoring America.

Israel has ignored Bush’s demand that it stop building and expanding settlements on a West Bank that is to be the heartland of a Palestinian state. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been secretly negotiating with Syria for the return of the Golan Heights in exchange for peace.

When America refused to play honest broker between Jerusalem and Damascus, Turkey, at Israel’s request, stepped into the role.

The pro-American Lebanese government of Prime Minister Siniora has negotiated a truce and power-sharing arrangement with Hezbollah, giving that militant Shiite movement and party veto power in the Beirut government. Egypt is negotiating with Hamas for a truce in the Israeli-Gaza war and to effect the exchange of a captured Israeli solider held by Hamas for Hamas fighters held in Israel.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard, designated a terrorist organization by the Senate, helped to arrange the ceasefire between government forces and the Mahdi Army in Basra and Sadr City. While the United States has used the roughest of language to denounce Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president has been received as an honored guest by the Iraqi government we support and by the Ayatollah Sistani, who has yet to meet a high-ranking American.

When Bush went to the Middle East to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Israel as the Zionist he has become, he was criticized by a Palestinian leader who survives on U.S. aid. When he went to Riyadh to plead for an increase in the flow of oil, he got a token concession from the king.

In Pakistan, the new government has been negotiating a truce with the radicalized frontier provinces, which would leave the Taliban with a privileged sanctuary from which to prepare their annual offensives to overthrow the government in Kabul and expel the Americans, as their fathers expelled the Russians.

As Russia and China move closer together to oppose U.S. missile defenses and the U.S. presence, military and economic, in the Caucasus and Central Asia, Latin America seems to be going its own leftward way. The halcyon days of the Alliance for Progress are long gone.

The world seems to be waiting for Bush to depart and for the next American president. For the foreign policy differences between John McCain and Barack Obama are as real and stark as they have been since the Reagan-Carter election of 1980, or the Nixon-McGovern election of 1972.

Looking back on the years since 9-11, it is hard to give the Bush foreign policy passing grades. We pushed NATO eastward and alienated Russia. We have 140,000 Army and Marine Corps troops tied down in Iraq in a war now in its sixth year, from which our NATO allies have all extricated themselves. We have another war going in Afghanistan, where the situation is as grave as it has been since we went in.

The Bush democracy crusade was put on the shelf after producing election triumphs for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, after Iraq, appears to be headed there, as well.

America remains the first economic and military power on earth. But after seven years of Bush, we no longer inspire the awe or hopes we once did. We are no longer the world hegemonic power of the neocons’ depiction. And the reason is that Bush embraced their utopian ideology of democratic empire and listened to their siren’s call to be the Churchill of his age.

Of Bush, it may be said he was a far better politician and candidate than his father, but as a statesman and world leader, he could not carry the old man’s loafers.

The Conservative Movement's Grandest Lady -- Congratulations, Dr. Schlafly!

From the Daily News-Record

Honoring Mrs. Schlafly

Boorish Students Ruin Ceremony

It's a funny thing about free speech. As Americans, we are obliged to honor the concept embedded in our Bill of Rights. And it's well that we should — and not only in the breach, or when the "speech" in question pleases our sensitivities. It is with this in mind that we dare to comment on a form of expression that dishonored longtime conservative advocate Phyllis Schlafly at a solemn ceremony last week in St. Louis. Much to its credit, Washington University decided to bestow an honorary doctorate in humane letters to Mrs. Schlafly, who already holds two degrees from the school. Segments of the faculty and student body urged university officials to rescind the degree. They declined, again much to their credit. As Margaret Bush Wilson, a retired civil rights attorney who volunteered to introduce Mrs. Schlafly, said, "It is Phyllis Schlafly's persona — not her politics or views — which is being recognized here today." Hear, hear. Still, when the time came to award the degree, a number of students, their families, and, disgracefully, faculty — already wearing white armbands in protest — turned their backs on Mrs. Schlafly. Three faculty members even walked off the stage. Here's our point: Given our tradition of free speech, these people were well within their rights to make such a demonstration. But, likewise, we are well within ours to describe it as rude, boorish, and totally lacking in class and good taste. We are similarly entitled to note the arrant hypocrisy of certain members of an academic community that spouts its commitment to "tolerance" and "diversity." Apparently such virtues are to be lavished only on folks who espouse the same opinions and world-view. Some "diversity." By the way, the 83-year-old Mrs. Schlafly refused to be flummoxed. Of her degree, she said, "It's the highest honor a university can give to anyone." And, in a barb aimed directly at her student detractors, she added, "I'm not sure they're mature enough to graduate." And, as we see it, that would go for those faculty members — adults acting sophomorically — as well.

New Testaments Torched in Israel

With all of President Bush's talk about bringing democracy, freedom and tolerance to all the peoples of the world, it is important to remember that Israel, one of the largest recipients of US aid over the past half century and one of this country's closest allies, persecutes Christians, has presided over a diaspora of Christians who lived in Palestine since the time of Christ, and imprisons Christian missionaries for simply giving away Bibles and religious tracts. The following story from CNN is a reminder that President Bush might want to begin his "democracy crusade" with those nations over which we should have some influence.

From CNN
By Mark Bixler

(CNN) -- Police in Israel are investigating the burning of hundreds of New Testaments in a city near Tel Aviv, an incident that has alarmed advocates of religious freedom.

Investigators plan to review photographs and footage showing "a fairly large" number of New Testaments being torched this month in the city of Or-Yehuda, a police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said Wednesday.

News accounts in Israel have quoted Uzi Aharon, the deputy mayor of Or-Yehuda, as saying he organized students who burned several hundred copies of the New Testament. The deputy mayor gave interviews to Israeli radio and television stations after word of the incident surfaced about two weeks ago.

Soon he was talking with Russian, Italian and French television stations, "explaining to their highly offended audiences back home how he had not meant for the Bibles to be burned, and trying to undo the damage caused by the news (and photographs) of Jews burning New Testaments," The Jerusalem Post reported.

Aharon told CNN on Wednesday that he collected New Testaments and other "Messianic propaganda" that had been handed out in the city but that he did not plan or organize a burning. Instead, he said, three teenagers set fire to a pile of New Testaments while he was not present. Once he learned what was going on, he said, he stopped the burning.

The episode has worried defenders of Israel's minority population of Messianic Jews, who consider themselves Jewish but believe in the divinity of Jesus, as do Christians. It also has concerned evangelical Christians in North America, Europe and Asia, who visit Israel by the hundreds of thousands.

Messianic Jews in Israel, told CNN he plans to file a formal complaint Thursday with the national police at the request of the United Christian Council in Israel, an umbrella organization for a few dozen Christian organizations outside Israel.

"I hope the people who are responsible for breaking the law will be indicted and prosecuted," he said.

About 200 New Testaments were burned, Aharon said, but he saved another 200.

His goal was to stop attempts to distribute Christian literature in the city, he said.

Myers, however, said he doubts that Messianic Jewish missionaries distributed the New Testaments. He said it's not clear how the volumes found their way into homes in Or-Yehuda.

The deputy mayor told CNN he respects the New Testament and would not do what has been done to the Jews in the past -- a reference to Nazi burning of Jewish and other books in the 1930s, and other occasions when Jewish texts, including sacred ones, were burned.

Myers said his complaint will ask the authorities to investigate possible violations of two Israeli laws. One forbids the destruction or desecration of any religious icon or item that a group holds sacred. Another bans people from speaking publicly in a way that offends or humiliates a certain religion.

Both laws are meant to prevent people from inciting religious violence, he said.

The burning controversy has unfolded against the backdrop of other instances that Myers cited as examples of discrimination against Messianic Jews in Israel.

About two months ago, the teenage son of a Messianic pastor was severely injured when a package delivered to his home exploded, Myers said. In addition, several rabbis urged students to boycott further participation in a Bible competition after they learned that one winner -- a high-school student in Israel -- was a Messianic Jew, he said.

Groups such as the Anti-Defamation League have sharply criticized the burning of New Testaments.

"We condemn this heinous act as a violation of the basic Jewish principles and values," said Rabbi Eric J. Greenburg, director of interfaith policy for the Anti-Defamation League. "It is essential that we respect the sacred texts of other faiths. The Jewish people can never forget the tragic burning of sacred Jewish volumes at many points in history."

"While there may be legitimate concerns of proselytizing, these matters must be addressed through the proper legal channels," Greenburg said in a statement. "It is unacceptable and not legitimate to burn someone else's sacred texts."

Thomas Sowell on "Mascot Politics"

Thomas Sowell has written a superbly insightful column, "Mascot Politics," about the hypocrisy of liberals and the injustice of their "affirmative action" schemes. In addition to the examples Sowell cites, contrasting the everyday brotherhood, fair play and humanity of many conservatives with liberals "who use blacks as mascots," he might have also mentioned the late Charlton Heston, a conservative who quietly participated in the civil rights marches of the 1960's.

We Remember

From Tradition, Family and Property

By Norman Fulkerson

On September 29, 2006, Ramadi, Iraq was considered the most dangerous city on planet earth for American servicemen. Michael Monsoor was there in the midst of it all. He was a member of the elite branch of the Navy called SEALS, which stands for SEa, Air and Land. On that day, he was on a rooftop over-watch in the most contested part of the city called the Ma’laab district. Positioned near the only exit, with an MK 48 machine gun in hand, he was providing security for two SEAL snipers who lay in prone positions on either side of him. Moments later a fragmentation grenade bounced off his chest and landed on the ground...

Becoming a Navy SEAL

Although nothing can adequately prepare one for such a circumstance, Michael Monsoor seemed to be living a life which pointed to it. He was an adventuresome boy growing up in Southern California. His father George and older brother Jim had both been proud Marines. His boyhood dream of being a SEAL began to be realized when, at 20 years of age, he joined the Navy.

In the first phase of training, he broke his heel. Exhibiting the selflessness which would become his trademark, he continued to run with a pain so excruciating he nearly passed out. Unable to continue, he was forced to ring the bell indicating that a trainee had quit the program. He was medically rolled back and sent to Italy for a year where he spent the majority of his off time doing physical training. His mother, Sally, when visiting him, said he hardly ever stopped running.

He then reentered a grueling SEAL program where only 23% pass, graduated at the top in the class of 2005 and was assigned to Delta Platoon. In April 2006 he was sent to Iraq on his first tour of duty.

From here we almost lose our breath as we follow the rapid upward trajectory his life would take.

Rescued from the Jaws of Death

As a heavy-weapons machine gunner, his position while patrolling the streets of Ramadi with Delta Company was right behind the point man. The responsibility for protecting the rest of the unit fell squarely on his shoulders. It was an appropriate position for a Catholic young man named after the warrior angel, Saint Michael.

He was also a SEAL communicator which required him to carry a rucksack full of communications equipment in addition to his MK 48 machine gun full of ammunition. He carried the extra 100 lbs, without complaint, in temperatures as high as 130 degrees.

In May of 2006, during his first month in Iraq, his unit came under fire during counter-terrorist operations. Heavy enemy automatic weapons fire resulted in a wounded SEAL who was left exposed to enemy fire. Michael threw caution to the wind and ran directly into the line of fire to help the injured soldier. As gun fire chewed up the asphalt around him, Michael snatched the wounded soldier from the jaws of death with one arm, returned enemy fire with the other and then dragged him to safety.

He then maintained suppressive fire while the wounded SEAL received tactical casualty treatment. After loading his wounded teammate onto an evacuation vehicle, he returned to the battle. This act of heroism earned him a Silver Star and a reputation for putting others first.

Some months later the injured soldier had a dream of the incident where the Michael who rescued him had wings. He later had an artist make a reproduction of the image in his dream depicting Michael Monsoor in dress blues with a loaded MK 48 Machine gun and silvery wings. As a tribute to Saint Michael the Archangel, who he felt was there with them, he included the short exorcism which invokes the warrior angel to “be our protection against wickedness.”

Streets Paved with Fire

Such protection was sorely needed especially considering that 75% of the missions involving Michael’s platoon came under attack. Thirty five escalated into heated firefights taking place in “streets that were paved with fire.”

During eleven of those missions Michael’s leadership, guidance and decisive action were key in saving the lives of many of his men. For his heroism he was awarded the Bronze Star. The citation accompanying the medal describes how he “exposed himself to heavy enemy fire while shielding his teammates with suppressive fire. He aggressively stabilized each chaotic situation with focused determination and uncanny tactical awareness. Each time [terrorists] assaulted his team with small arms fire or rocket propelled grenades, he quickly assessed the situation, determined the best course of action to counter the enemy assaults, and implemented his plan to gain the best tactical advantage.”

In the midst of such violent action, Michael Monsoor displayed what Secretary of the Navy, Donald Winter described as a “cool headedness under fire” and “when hostility broke out, he proved he was a SEAL you wanted on your team.”

As extraordinary as all of this is, it was merely a prelude to the defining moment of his life in the rooftop over-watch.

“Path of Honor”

When the grenade landed in front of him, Michael Monsoor knew that the length of the fuse would not allow him to toss it out. He also knew that he was two short weeks away from returning home to family and friends. Plans were already made for him to see his younger brother play in a football game for North Dakota’s Minot State University.

With the only exit door at his back, a live grenade at his feet and two Navy Seals in front of him he was faced with the hardest decision of his life. It was one of those rare moments when life passes before your eyes. Having already endured so many hardships and numerous brushes with death no one would have faulted him had he chosen a path to safety.

“He chose a different path,” said Mr. Winter, “a path of honor.” On numerous occasions, Michael Monsoor stared death in the face in his heroic defense of others. Once again he and death would meet and once again he put others first. With unflinching selflessness he gave his life so that others might live. In so doing, he saved the lives of three Navy SEALS and eight Iraqi soldiers.

One of the survivors described how “Mikey” looked death in the face that day and said, “You cannot take my brothers, I will go in their stead.”

“He never took his eye off the grenade, his only movement was down and toward it," said a 28-year-old lieutenant who lived to tell the story. “He undoubtedly saved mine and the other SEALs' lives.”

Another eyewitness described Michael’s countenance, as “completely calm, showing no fear only resolve.”

It could easily be said of him what Gen. Pericles said in his funeral oration for the warriors of ancient Athens, “He passed away from the scene, not of his fear, but of his glory.”

Feast of St. Michael the Archangel

Michael Monsoor was immediately evacuated to a battalion aid station. Fr. Paul Anthony Halladay, his platoon chaplain, was with Michael as he passed away approximately 30 minutes later.

It was an appropriate end for a Catholic soldier who, according to many reports, was a practicing Catholic. His fellow soldiers told how he frequently attended mass “with devotion” before his operations.

Patricia Monsoor, his aunt and godmother, said he “went to confession frequently” and “other soldiers who were not practicing would sometimes follow [him to mass] because of his good example.”

When he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, a tearful President Bush reminded the audience that the day Michael Monsoor died was the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel.

An emotional Donald Winter quoted a passage from scripture already remembered by so many to describe Michael Monsoor. “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

“When it came down to laying down his life for his friends, his faith allowed him to [do so] without a moment's hesitation,” said Father Halladay.

“I Have Given Everything”

The most moving tribute to Petty Officer Michael Monsoor was that given by Lt. Commander John Willink during an evening ceremony at the Navy Memorial honoring the fallen hero.

He described in detail a photo of Michael released shortly after his death. The picture shows Michael walking at the head of his platoon, through the war-torn streets of Ramadi. They are shrouded in a greenish yellow mist used to mask their movements from the enemy. In spite of the chaos and danger which surrounds them, Michael is calm, almost smiling.

“As I look at this picture,” Lt. Willink said, “I hear a voice in a humble but confident tone.”

He then finishes his speech with the words he imagines Michael saying to him. They are words which I feel Michael Monsoor is saying to every American who appreciates the unbelievable sacrifice he made in a faraway land. Far from his family and the country he loved.

“I am Michael Monsoor…

“I am patrolling the streets of Ramadi… My eyes sting from the sweat, my gun and gear are heavy but these things do not bother me. There is no comfort here but this is the life I have chosen and there is no place I would rather be…and I am ready.

“I am Michael Monsoor… I miss my family. I want to hold my nieces and nephews again. I want to make them smile and laugh but I am far from home. Instead I smile at the Iraqi children when we pass them by. When we encounter Iraqi families I treat them with respect and dignity. I know the importance of family because there is nothing more important to me, than my family…

“I am Michael Monsoor, I love my country, my fellow SEALS and the men fighting along side us… I have lived life to its fullest. I have not looked back. I leave nothing but love and I have no regrets.

“I am Michael Monsoor… and I have given everything…For you!”

Renee Fleming sings "Ave Maria" (Schubert)

Report: Obama Mentored By Communist Party Figure

Frank Marshall Davis

From WorldNetDaily.com

By Jerome R. Corsi

Investigations Show Ties to Radicals Who Shaped Him, Helped Launch His Political Career

Barack Obama had extensive ties with extreme anti-American elements, including agents of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA, in Hawaii and Chicago, according to two new reports released yesterday in Washington, D.C., by two experienced internal security investigators.

Investigative journalist Cliff Kincaid and Herbert Romerstein, a former investigator with the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, presented evidence Obama was mentored, while attending high school in Hawaii, by Frank Marshall Davis, an African-American poet and journalist who was also a CPUSA member.

The authors, in a separate report, document Obama's ties to radicals in Chicago who helped launch his career.

In a paper entitled "Communism in Hawaii and the Obama Connection," the authors document that in 1948, Davis decided to move from Chicago to Honolulu at the suggestion of what they describe as two "secret CPUSA members," actor Paul Robeson and Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen Union, or ILWU.

In Chicago, Davis had worked for the Chicago Star newspaper; in Honolulu, he was hired as a reporter for the Honolulu Record, both identified by Kincaid and Romerstein as "communist front newspapers."

In his autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Obama discusses the influence a mentor identified in the book only as "Frank" had on his intellectual development.

Obama described Frank as a drinking companion of his grandfather, who had boasted of his association with African-American authors Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during the time Frank was a journalist in Chicago.

Romerstein, in addition to having served as investigator with the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, served in the same capacity with the House Committee on Internal Security and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was the head of the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation for the U.S. Information Agency. Romerstein is also co-author of the influential book "The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors," which included extensive documentation of the communist activities of Roosevelt administration staffer Alger Hiss.

Kincaid is the founder and president of America's Survival Inc., an independent watchdog group that monitors the U.N. and international terrorism. He is also editor of Accuracy in Media's AIM Report.

Are you a member of the Communist Party?

Kincaid and Romerstein quote Kathryn Takara of the University of Hawaii, who wrote a dissertation on the life of Frank Marshall Davis, confirming Davis was a significant influence on Obama when the senator attended Punahou prep school in Hawaii from 1975 to 1979.

A transcript of a 1956 hearing before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee discovered by internal security affairs researcher and writer Max Friedman showed Davis took the Fifth Amendment when asked by the subcommittee if he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party.

In the second report, "Communism in Chicago and the Obama Connection," Kincaid and Romerstein present evidence supporting their contention the SDS organization from which the Weather Underground organization and radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn came, received financial contributions from the CPUSA, which in turn receive its funding from Moscow.

Obama's run for the Illinois state Senate was launched by a fundraiser organized at Ayers' and Dorhn's Chicago home by Alice Palmer. Palmer had named Obama to succeed her in the state Senate in 1995, when she decided to run for a U.S. congressional seat.

Nine years before Palmer picked Obama to be her successor, she was the only African-American journalist to travel to the Soviet Union to attend the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, according to an article Palmer wrote in the CPUSA newspaper, People's Daily World, June 19, 1986.

"There has been no explanation of why Ayers et al. played a role in launching Obama's political career," Kincaid wrote.

Kincaid and Romerstein present documentation that Tom Hayden, another major figure in the SDS, is today one of four principal initiators of the "Progressives for Obama" movement, which calls for ending the war in Iraq "as quickly as possible, not in five years."

According to Kincaid and Romerstein, U.S. Peace Council executive committee member Frank Chapman "blew the whistle on communist support for Obama's presidential bid and his real agenda" in a letter to the People's Weekly World after Obama's win in the Iowa Democratic Party caucuses.

"Obama's victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle," Chapman wrote. "Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface.

Kincaid and Romerstein wrote, "The clear implication of Chapman's letter is that Obama himself, or some of his Marxist supporters, are acting like moles in the political process. The suggestion is that something is being hidden from the public."

Can A Catholic Support the Treaty of Lisbon?

From The Irish Society for Christian Civilisation

I am a Catholic.

Can I approve of the Treaty of Lisbon?

The violation of non-negotiable principles raises a grave question of conscience for Irish Catholics in the face of this referendum.

A spectre is haunting Europe—it threatens you, the Christian future of your family, of Ireland, and of the Continent. It is a European Union without God and without moral principles.

The Treaty of Lisbon seeks to reform, for you and for all Irish Catholics, the fundamental values which govern the functioning of the European Union. These new values are in stark contrast to the non-negotiable principles given by Pope Benedict XVI.

The Pope insists that, in the construction of Europe, there are three areas in which the Church defends “non-negotiable principles”:

• “the protection of life at every stage;


• “the recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family;


• “and the protection of the right of parents to educate their children”.

To be at peace with his conscience, when casting his vote in the referendum, a Catholic has to give absolute priority to these non-negotiable principles. The moral preservation of our children and the future prosperity of Catholic Ireland and of all Europe will depend on the level of respect that the E.U. shows towards these principles.

Catholics must reject the Treaty of Lisbon

Our Lord Jesus Christ commanded: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His justice, and everything else shall be added on to you.” In contrast to the Divine commandment, if the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified by Irish Catholics:

• The E.U. will ignore God and the Christian roots of Europe and will create a new European identity based on radical secularism and atheistic philosophies.
  We do not want our children to grow up in an Ireland without God!


• The E.U. will impose a relativistic and evolving idea of human rights, contrary to Catholic moral teaching. We do not want the relativisation of the principles that we will pass on to our children and grandchildren!


• The E.U. will considerably restrict the protection of human life and will facilitate abortion, euthanasia, and embryo experimentation. We do not want the mass
  murder of innocents being promoted throughout Europe!


• The E.U. will destroy the family by dissociating it from marriage between one man and one woman. Our children have the right to live in a normal home, in accordance with Catholic principles!
  

• The E.U. will impose excessive limits on the right of the parents to educate their children in accordance with their convictions. The freedom to pass on the Faith is a legacy that can never be challenged in Catholic Ireland!


• The E.U. will recognise, for the first time in the history of international treaties, “sexual orientation” as a basis for non-discrimination, opening the way for homosexual marriage and adoption of children by homosexuals. If today promiscuity and immorality already invade our homes and ruin the education of our children, what will it be like when these kinds of practices are imposed on us?

Catholics: only by uniting our voices can we be saved from this tragedy and this chastisement

To prevent Ireland and all of Europe from distancing itself even further from the Kingdom of God, Irish Society for Christian Civilisation is campaigning for a rejection of the Treaty of Lisbon in the name of the Catholic non-negotiable principles.

According to the late Pope, John Paul II, it is “the laity which by its particular vocation has the specific role of interpreting the history of the world in the light of Christ.”

If you consider it a matter of conscience to make heard the voice of Catholic Ireland in this debate, then you already are part of this campaign.

Click Here to read the study: “9 reasons why a conscientious Catholic citizen should reject the Treaty of Lisbon.”

You will understand why this referendum is happening at this crucial time in our history, and why it is not right for a Catholic to abstain in this hour of need. Above all, you will be able to influence and direct others among your acquaintances, clarifying the issues for them to prevent them from voting for the Treaty of Lisbon through ignorance or because of media or peer pressure.

Participating in this campaign you will be doing your bit to alert our fellow Catholics so that, at the moment of casting their votes, they will remember what Jesus said: “He who is ashamed of Me and of My words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when He comes into His glory.” (Lk. 9:26)

For the honour and glory of the Most Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ, say no to the Treaty of Lisbon and you will be saying yes to a Catholic Ireland and yes to a Christian Europe.

The Heart of an Islamist

From FrontPageMagazine.com
By David Solway

[The following is an excerpt from David Solway's new work-in-progress, Living in the Valley of Shmoon .]

The West, whether the European Lilliput or the American Brobdingnag, has not yet realized that Middle Eastern-style autocracies are categorically different from Western-style democracies. It does not appreciate the role of culture and history in forming the folkways, attitudes and presuppositions of a people. It has not understood that the Islamic world does not play by our rules and that it lives by an entirely different code of conduct from that which we have taken for granted for centuries—a code in which reciprocities, trade-offs, standard negotiating parameters and the dialectic of mutual advantage do not signify. We refuse to see that we are dealing with a culture that is fundamentally alien to ours and that does not accept the axioms, postulates and expectations of politically pragmatic discourse or the procedures of reasonable accommodation. It is a culture whose institutional basis has almost nothing in common with the civic armature of Western civilization that has allowed the latter, albeit at great cost and in far too desultory a fashion, to resist its own homegrown tyrannies.

In the 21st century the Leviathan that would swallow us rises from another sea than our own. Western Christendom and post-Christendom are based on a completely different “symbolic order”—Jacques Lacan’s term for the way symbols are used unconsciously by a culture—from that of the Islamic world, especially with respect to the concept of individual autonomy, the modalities of personal salvation, the idea of citizenship, the rule of established law and the binding force of international accords.

We must also bear in mind that the enemy holds a clear advantage in what Norman Podhoretz has called, after the Cold War, World War IV: the terrorist camarillas, unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War, have few structural assets to protect and the rogue regimes which protect them rely on their control of the oil supply and their stockpiling of Western currency reserves for immunity from retaliation. When a set of cultural assumptions rooted in an alien scripture and a traditional worldview which repudiate what we have come to understand as social and political evolution is added to these factors, the task before us takes on dismaying and redoubtable proportions.

We really have little idea how foreign the Islamic mindset is to our way of thinking and feeling. For example, we regard a death in battle as a loss—the word “losses” is a common synonym for “casualties”; whereas in the Islamic view, as attested in both the Koran and the hadith, each “loss” in battle is no such thing but a translation into paradise, a picayune price to pay for the gift of immediate salvation and part of the “bargain” the believer has closed with Allah. What we see as losses, the Muslim sees as gains, the “supreme triumph” guaranteed by the Faith. “Allah has purchased of the faithful their lives and worldly goods and in return has promised them the Garden. They will fight for his cause, slay and be slain…Rejoice then in the bargain you have made” (Koran 9:111). Death is sought and celebrated. This has no point of contact with what we have hallowed as the dicta of reason. What we do everything in our power to evade, the enemy joyfully welcomes. What we suffer as a privation, the enemy cherishes as a promotion. What we regard as a curse, the enemy accepts as a benefaction. Try, as they say, to get your mind around that.

As Lee Harris argues in The Suicide of Reason, in a prolonged standoff the rule of law is no match for the rule of the jungle, the individualist “rational actor” cannot hope to triumph against the collectivist “tribal actor”—at least, not until he adapts his strategy to meet the challenge—and the “myth of reason” in which we have come to believe, if we are unable or unwilling to refocus our attitude to the world, will see to our defeat at the hands of those who do not recognize the “normal rules of engagement” and “cannot take a moral stance outside the perspective of [their] tribe.” And the crisis we are now facing does not allow for that species of adjournment we call diplomacy or the nepenthean illusion of “dialogue” with an interlocutor who does not abide by its formative assumptions. Time is running out. “The borderless challenge of emancipated warriors,” cautions French philosopher André Glucksmann, “allows us little leisure for procrastination” (City Journal, August 2007). If we are not careful, it may well be game, set, match.

What the situation cries out for today are deeply educated and farsighted statesmen of the stamp of Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion, or at the very least determined political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Instead, our fate is in the hands of one-dimensional, small men and women without vision, knowledge of history or the courage to act, except insofar as they are prospecting for votes. It is not only, as Joe Klein contends in Politics Lost, that the political process has been trivialized by the burgeoning tribe of “marketing professionals, consultants, and pollsters who…have robbed public life of its romance and vigor,” but that the subjects of the “pollster-consultant industrial complex” are themselves devoid of moral and intellectual substance to begin with. This fact was recognized by Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who in a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia said: “When I speak with the American, I speak with someone who doesn’t know anything” (Steven Emerson Blog, March 25, 2008). Add to this sorry spectacle of political vapidness and acedia the editorial vaporizings of a philistine press and the parlous state of journalistic ethics, and we have, to put it mildly, a big problem. Yet it does not take a mantic expertise to discern the probable future should we continue to sit back, swallow the sedatives of standard political analysis and let events take their course. For it is not just that Jews are under threat in the new wave of antisemitism spreading throughout the world. It is the Western secular democracies as well, in which both Jews and non-Jews have, if only intermittently, enjoyed the benefits of peace, prosperity and common egalitarian values, that are in grave danger of subsidence.

This is what all too many in the West, including its power-holders and influence-peddlers, refuse to understand. We are truly in a war, different from any war we have fought in the past, waged on many different fronts from fifth column infiltration to an expanding demographic to incendiary physical assault to “Dark Web” terror attacks on basic cyber infrastructures to the introduction of Shari’a Compliant Finance on the stock market, but a real war nevertheless that will persist well into the century. Let us not dissemble or extenuate. In its militant dimension it is a war that is once again approaching our shores—9/11 was only the opening salvo—and which will have real consequences in large numbers of casualties, civil disruption, cultural prostration and economic breakdown.

And it is a war that, in the long term, we may well lose if we do not awaken to the peril which confronts us. It is not by the pricking of our thumbs that some of us fear the imminence of a generations-long tumult but by a sober reading of the historical archive, the absorption of the relevant literature and an informed and common-sense alertness to the current scene. Those of us who are sounding the alarm will naturally be accused by the droves of sleepwalkers shuffling in the public domain of exaggeration and even of war-mongering in our turn. But when these contemporary R.I.P. Van Winkles are finally jarred awake by events, they will likely find themselves living and dying in a very different world from the one in which they fell asleep.

In his introduction to The Best American Essays (2002), entitled “To Open a Millennium,” Stephen J. Gould remarked that, as the 20th century began at the end of World War I, so the 21rst century dawned the day after September 11, 2001. This was the “fateful year” and the meaning of 9/11 was the substantive issue to be addressed. I venture to say he was correct. We are now challenged as never before as the 21st century unfolds toward the seismic event of civilizational conflict between a messianic world-faith and a secular world-view. There are no atoms of compatibility between two such global systems of culture and belief. Let us listen to the music before we have to face it. For the theme song of the Islamic adversary—we have the authority of Hamas chieftain Mahmoud Zahar on this—may be regarded as a modification of the famous Leonard Cohen lyric: first we take Jerusalem, then we take New York.

RomneyCare: The New Big Dig

Conservatives were asked to believe that Mitt Romney had seen the light and (as of a week ago last Tuesday) is now one of us. He was also touted as an expert on the economy.

It turns out, however, that the "universal health care" plan implemented by this big government, liberal is bankrupting the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Today's Wall Street Journal points out that the plan is hardly universal. Only an additional 350,000 have received coverage as a result of the plan. Yet over the next decade, budget overruns could total a catastrophic $4 billion. Let's hope that John McCain, who admits to knowing little about economics, doesn't turn to this "expert" for advice.

Michigan Homosexual Lobby Backs Jail, Lawsuits For Refusal to Recognize Homosexual "Marriage"

Gary Glenn

President of AFA-Michigan

Homosexual activist says business owners should be jailed, newspapers sued and "slapped publicly"

LOS ANGELES -- Michigan's largest homosexual activist group says once marriage is legally redefined to include homosexual couples, business owners and even news media outlets who refuse to recognize such marriages should be jailed or sued and "publicly slapped," a Jewish and openly bisexual columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News reported Monday.

Statements attributed in the column to homosexual lobbyist Sean Kosofsky, director of policy for the Detroit-based Triangle Foundation, were denounced Wednesday by American Family Association of Michigan President Gary Glenn, co-author of the Marriage Protection Amendment approved by voters in 2004 to constitutionally reaffirm the legal definition of marriage in Michigan as only between one man and one woman.

"The Triangle Foundation openly admits homosexual activists' intentions, once they gain sufficient political power, to impose their radical social agenda on America by brute force, trampling cherished American values such as religious freedom, freedom of speech, academic freedom, and even freedom of the press if it stands in their way," Glenn said.

Glenn pointed to comments by Kosofsky reported Monday by David Benkof, author of Gay Essentials: Facts for Your Queer Brain and founder of the Q Syndicate, a "gay"-press syndicate that provides columns and other material to a hundred homosexual newspapers.

Benkof, who strays from "gay" political orthodoxy by opposing the redefinition of marriage, wrote in a column published Monday by the Los Angeles Daily News that he had interviewed homosexual activists nationally about the legal implications of a California Supreme Court ruling last week declaring a constitutional "right" to so-called homosexual "marriage."

Benkof wrote: "What happens if a traditionally religious business owner wants to extend his 'marriage discount' only to couples married in his eyes? Sean Kosofsky of Michigan's largest gay-rights group, the Triangle Foundation, says, 'If you are a public accommodation and you are open to anyone on Main Street, that means you must be open to everyone on Main Street. If they don't do it, that's contempt and they will go to jail.' " http://www.dailynews.com/editorial/ci_9312682

Benkof continued: "Michael Taylor-Judd, the president of the Legal Marriage Alliance of Washington state, said if a newspaper writes that a given same-sex marriage wasn't really a marriage, 'it is certainly in the realm of possibility for someone to bring a (libel) suit, and quite possibly to be successful.' Kosofsky agreed: 'I would be sympathetic to some damages. They need to be slapped publicly.' "

(See link to Benkof column below)

Glenn said the Triangle Foundation routinely justifies its hostility toward individuals and organizations who disagree with homosexual activists' political agenda, as well as Triangle's admitted plans to suppress their opponents' free speech rights, by demonizing those who support traditional one-man, one-woman marriage as promoters of "hate" and violence.

* The Triangle Foundation's web site currently features a news release charging that support for Michigan's Marriage Protection Amendment by Glenn and Catholic Cardinal Adam Maida of the Archdiocese of Detroit was a motivating factor in the alleged beating death of a homosexual senior citizen last year in Detroit. "It is appalling hypocrisy," the statement reads, "for (Glenn and Maida) to pretend that their venomous words and organizing have no connection to the plague of hate violence against gay people, including the murder of Mr. Anthos." http://www.tri.org/violence/pdfs/taskforce.pdf

Triangle's claims were proven false when police reported they found no evidence of assault and

the Wayne County medical examiner's office concluded the man had died from natural causes after a fall resulting from arthritic paralysis. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,262308,00.html

* Kosofsky has for years publicly accused Glenn's organization of supporting murder, though only one news media outlet has ever published the allegation. "We personally believe that the AFA may support the murder of gay, lesbian and bisexual people," Kosofsky said, as reported in 2001 by State News, the student newspaper at Michigan State University.

http://www.statenews.com/index.php/article/2001/11/gay-rights_group_fights

And Kosofsky in a published column in 2005 called Cardinal Maida "recklessly wicked," accused him of "arrogance, bigotry and hypocrisy," and said the Catholic church's position in support of one-man, one-woman marriage "should be tossed in the trash."

http://www.pridesource.com/article.shtml?article=13021

Glenn also noted that when Kosofsky said news media outlets should be sued and "slapped publicly" if they report material to which homosexual activists object, one example may have been fresh on his mind. Last month, Kosofsky attacked WNEM-TV Channel 5, Saginaw, for its coverage of a pro-homosexual student protest in public schools. "WNEM has run one of the worst stories I have seen in recent years on Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender issues by using insensitive and inflammatory terms," Kosofsky wrote on his blog, Blog O' Queer.

http://www.blogoqueer.org/2008/04/horrible-coverage-of-day-of-silence-in.html

Violations of religious freedom, free speech rights, academic freedom, and freedom of the press have become routine in countries and states that have already adopted so-called homosexual "marriage" or "hate crime" laws based on homosexual behavior, Glenn said.

* Swedish Pastor Ake Green in 2004 was sentenced to 30 days in jail for preaching a sermon in which he defined homosexual behavior as sinful and harmful to society. http://www.akegreen.org/

* Baptist Press reported in 2005: "A Catholic bishop in Canada is under investigation by a government agency for condemning 'gay marriage'... The bishop, Fred Henry of Calgary, is being investigated by the Alberta Human Rights Commission for comments he made about homosexuality in both a letter to parishioners and a Calgary Sun newspaper column. Two homosexuals filed the complaints." http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=20716

* The Irish Times reported in 2003: "Clergy and bishops who distribute the Vatican's latest publication describing homosexual activity as 'evil' could face prosecution under incitement to hatred legislation. ...Those convicted under the Act can face jail terms of up to six months."

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/frontpage/2003/0802/1059775167952.html

* The London Daily Telegraph reported in 2006: "New Government proposals on equality could require clergy to bless homosexual 'weddings' or face prosecution, the Church of England said yesterday. It said the proposed regulations could undermine official teaching and require Christians to act against their religious convictions." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1520849/Church-

* Catholic Charities in Boston was forced by a state "sexual orientation" law to either process the adoption of children to homosexual couples, a direct violation of Vatican policy, or abandon their century-old adoption referral services altogether. They chose the latter. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/03/11/catholic_charities_stuns_state_ends_adoptions

* The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix newspaper was ordered by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal to pay three homosexual men $1,500 each after the newspaper agreed to run an ad that featured Bible verses critical of homosexual behavior. "As the Star-Phoenix lawyer said in his closing statement (before the Tribunal), 'A Human Rights ruling against the Star-Phoenix and Mr. Owens could limit freedom of speech in the media, in churches and in classrooms.'" http://www.realwomenca.com/newsletter/1999_Sept_Oct/article_7.html

* A British couple were questioned by police on possible "hate crime" charges after they wrote a letter-to-the-editor of their local newspaper criticizing city officials for distributing brochures at city hall promoting homosexual behavior. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/lancashire/4555406.stm

* The London Daily Telegraph reported last month: "A Christian couple who have taken in 28 children have been forced to give up being foster parents after they refused to promote homosexuality. Vincent Matherick, 65, and his 61-year-old wife Pauline were told by social services that they had to comply with legislation requiring them to treat homosexuality as equal to heterosexuality." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1567160/Christian-foster-parents-condemn-

* A British Anglican bishop in February was fined for refusing to hire an openly homosexual man as a church youth minister. http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/feb/08021104.html

* The London Daily Telegraph reported in 2003: "A bishop who angered homosexuals by suggesting they seek a psychiatric cure is to be investigated by police to see if his outspoken views amount to a criminal offence, it emerged yesterday."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1446318/Bishop

* Eleven Christians in Philadelphia -- including two grandmothers in their 70's, one white and one African-American -- were arrested and charged with "ethnic intimidation" under Pennsylvania's "hate crimes" law when they tried to read Bible verses out loud during a homosexual street festival. They faced a cumulative 47 years in prison had they been convicted. http://www.cultureandfamily.org/articledisplay.asp?id=6542&department=CFI&categoryid=nation

* A New Mexico Christian photographer was fined $6,600 for refusing on religious grounds to photograph a homosexual marriage-like "commitment" ceremony.

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200804/CUL20080416a.html

* Catholic bishops in Belgium and Spain were sued in 2004 by homosexual activist groups for making public statements in opposition to homosexual behavior and homosexual "marriage."

http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=43235

* Boston public school teachers were threatened with termination if they failed to portray so-called homosexual "marriage" in a positive light. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=27201

The full text of Benkof's column in the Los Angeles Daily News is here.

Georgia Governor Signs School-Choice Bill

From Family News in Focus

About 10,000 students could benefit from landmark legislation.

Thanks to a $50 million school-choice bill signed into law last week by Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, students stuck in failing public schools will be able to transfer to private schools.

The Scholarship Tax Credit program allows corporations and individuals to grant private-school scholarships in exchange for a tax credit.

Jamie Self, vice president of public policy at the Georgia Family Policy Council, said about 10,000 children could receive assistance.

“We’re looking forward to helping organizations start scholarship funds so students can get the education that their parents feel is best for them," she said.

The law puts Georgia among the leaders in school-choice legislation, with two programs in play. The state’s Special Needs Scholarship has been helping kids for the past year.

“Across the country, we are seeing more and more states adopting programs," said Andrew Campanella, spokesman for the Alliance for School Choice. “School choice provides a competitive marketplace. It gives parents options that they desperately need, and it revitalizes communities.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Most states have policies and programs that increase education options for families.

Pro-Lifers: Let's Picket NEA Teacher Convention in Washington, DC & NEA HQs in State Capitals July 2

From Christian Newswire

"Pro-Life activists, teachers, school employees, students, parents, and clergy are invited to come pray and peacefully picket the National Education Association's convention at the Washington Convention Center, July 2nd between 10:00AM and 2:00PM," announces Pro-Life Educators and Students (PLEAS) Coordinator, Bob Pawson. "Especially pro-lifers from DC, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Activate your groups. Bring your families, friends and pro-life signs and banners. Hundreds of citizens publicly admonishing NEA's leaders would create excellent media reportage and inspire the Pro-Life Movement nationwide. Let's go!"

Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama will surely address NEA's 9,000 Delegates, as they did last year; especially the eventual Democratic nominee. NEA-PAC may vote for and announce NEA's endorsement during the convention. Late-term abortionist George Tiller spoke at NEA headquarters for the Feminist Majority Foundation's Leadership Conference in March 2008

METRO Yellow and Green Lines provide convenient transportation to 'Mt. Vernon Sq/7th Street & Convention Center' station.

Pro-life groups and activists across America are urged to organize lunch-hour pickets at NEA State Affiliate HQs in all fifty states July 2nd. Most prolife groups have school employees in their ranks, including NEA members, to alert and activate

"Please unite in a high-profile rebuke of the leadership of America's largest, socio-politically meddlesome union for misrepresenting so many teachers on abortion. Seize this opportunity to focus nationwide attention and condemnation upon the pro-abortion activism of arrogant educrats disingenuously pretending to protect children and teachers' jobs."

"A pro-abortion position isn't just morally outrageous; it's stupid; economic suicide. Twenty-five abortions equal one lost classroom, lost teaching careers, and catastrophic losses to America's future," said Pawson, an NEA-NJEA teacher in Trenton.

"We teachers love children. Most are pro-life. It's unacceptable for union representatives to condone or promote killing babies, future students, in their mothers' wombs. We resent having our dues used to subvert our moral, social, and political values while creating artificial divisions among the rank-and-file. NEA must repeal Family Planning Resolution I-15 and similar policies to respect the diversity of 3.2 million members."

To recruit picketers, PLEAS is contacting pro-life organizations across America, including over fifty headquartered in the greater DC area.

Groups and individuals committed to picketing NEA should e-mail:

BobPawson@bringyourbible.com.

Bring traditional pro-life signs & messages like:

PRO-LIFE NEA MEMBER; PRO-LIFE TEACHER; PRO-LIFE STUDENT; REPEAL NEA RES I-15; MAKE NEA ABORTION-NEUTRAL; PRO-LIFE PARENT; FORMER FETUS/CURRENT STUDENT; ABORTION=FEWER STUDENTS; ABORTION=UNEMPLOYED TEACHERS; 25 ABORTIONS=1 LOST CLASS

Kids Deserve Choice of Better Schools

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger, 7/4/99)

As a sixth-grade public school student in 1963, I was asked to deliver a speech about brotherhood that my class had written to commemorate National Brotherhood Week. The riots that accompanied James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi had occurred a year earlier, and photographs of the dogs and fire hoses being turned on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, were fresh in the minds of Americans everywhere.

The closing words of that speech, suggested by our teacher, have remained with me ever since. They were the words of another Long Island student, an African-American girl, who said in a forensics competition, "Take my hand, for it is clean; take my heart, for it is pure; but do not refuse me justice because of the color of my skin, for if you do, I will refer you to God who made me."

The battle for universal civil rights, for freedom and opportunity for every American, has been the animating struggle of American history. It is a struggle that continues to this day. Meredith's struggle concerned the right of African-Americans to attend the college of their choice. Today, a growing number of parents, policy makers and citizens are beginning to demand recognition for a new civil right -- the right of poor Americans to send their children to the schools of their choice.

The opposition of modern-day teachers unions to school choice has placed them in direct conflict with poor inner-city parents, and with our American ideals of liberty and justice. The ultimate threat to government schools comes not from caring parents seeking the best schools for their children but from self-interested teachers unions, which secure generous salaries and benefits from monopoly school systems where, in inner-city neighborhoods, only one of every four students who enters the ninth grade graduates from high school.

In the years since delivering the Brotherhood Week speech, I have been privileged to work in Congress for the late Senator Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn., and in the White House for former President Bush. However, it was only in the past five years, while working in the inner-city for Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, that I fully grasped how far many American school systems have strayed from their ideals.

In 1995, Pepsi-Cola Co. approached the mayor's office with a proposal that would have resulted in a contribution from the company to a college scholarship program for every case of Pepsi products sold in Jersey City. We thanked the company for the offer, but explained that the great majority of kids in Jersey City had no hope of going to college. More than half of those who enter public high schools drop out, and fewer than half of those who remain pass a basic test required for graduation.

Would Pepsi consider, we asked, contributing to a new, privately funded scholarship program being established to help low-income parents who want to send their children to private elementary and secondary schools? This plan involved no public funds, would ease the burdens on the city's overcrowded schools, and would let poor people exercise the same choices enjoyed by more affluent parents, including the majority of Jersey City public schoolteachers who send their children to private schools. Pepsi agreed, and the scholarship program was announced to an approving media and a grateful city.

But within a day, we saw how ruthless those in control of the education monopoly are prepared to be in order to thwart choice and competition. Pepsi machines in public schools were vandalized throughout the city, and an official of the public schools (whose children had attended private schools) called Pepsi officials into her office to state that school choice is "elitist" and to protest Pepsi's involvement in the scholarship program. The president of the Jersey City teachers union, who sent his son to an elite private school, threatened a New Jersey Education Association boycott of Pepsi products across the state if the company did not withdraw its scholarship offer. Pepsi complied.

The racial oppressors of Meredith's day were able to hold back racial justice for a time, but they ultimately were moved out of the schoolhouse door, allowing Americans of all races to enter. Those who oppress the poor today think they can do so forever, but they are on the wrong side of history.

School choice can be delayed, but it can not be denied. The most powerful human instinct -- the love of parents for their children -- will overcome today's heartless union bosses, who would leave children in schools where they have a better chance of dropping out than of receiving a diploma. Polls now show strong majorities in New Jersey and across the United States in favor of school choice. Political and religious leaders and the courts are increasingly giving the idea a thumbs-up.

Americans are starting to recognize school choice as an important chapter in the civil-rights movement. But what will history say of those who denied justice, stood in the doorway, blocked private initiatives, thwarted the potential and ruined the lives of so many millions of students? Perhaps, like the Long Island girl, we can only refer them to the God who made us all.

Daniel J. Cassidy serves on the South Carolina Advisory Board to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

What Was A Liberal Education?

From The New Criterion
By Roger Kimball

The real difficulty in modern education lies in the fact that, despite all the fashionable talk about a new conservatism, even that minimum of conservation and the conserving attitude without which education is simply not possible is in our time extraordinarily hard to achieve.
—Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education”

To be deceived about the truth of things and so to be in ignorance and error and to harbor untruth in the soul is a thing no one would consent to.
—Socrates, in The Republic

“Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”
—The Dodo, in Alice in Wonderland

When I ponder the recent itinerary of education in this country—not just college education, but the whole shebang—I often think of that old advertisement for a brand of cigarettes designed to appeal especially to women: “You’ve come a long way, baby!” How right they were. But a distance traveled is not necessarily progress logged. It was not so long ago that Cardinal Newman’s enumeration of the goals of a liberal arts education in The Idea of a University could have been taken as a motto by the American academic establishment. Newman spoke of “a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life” as being the chief “objects of a University” education. Quite normal in the 1850s. But today? Or consider the observation made by the philosopher John Searle in the 1990s that “the idea that the curriculum should be converted to any partisan purposes is a perversion of the ideal of the university. The objective of converting the curriculum into an instrument of social transformation (leftist, rightist, centrist, or whatever) is the very opposite of higher education.” Until the day before yesterday, Searle’s warning was regarded as common sense. Now it is uncommon, and highly provocative, wisdom.

I am not suggesting that in the past our educational institutions always lived up to the ideal that Newman enunciated, or that they always avoided the perversion against which Professor Searle warned. But they aspired to. Indeed, until at least the early 1960s there was robust agreement about the intellectual and moral goals of a liberal arts education even if those goals seemed difficult to achieve. There was, for example, a shared commitment to the ideal of disinterested scholarship devoted to the preservation and transmission of knowledge—which meant the preservation and transmission of a civilization—pursued in a community free from ideological intimidation. If we inevitably fell short of the ideal, the ideal nevertheless continued to command respect and to exert a guiding influence.

The essays that follow provide a series of pathologist’s reports on contemporary liberal arts education in an age when traditional ideas about the civilizing nature and goals of education no longer enjoy widespread allegiance. It would be difficult to overstate the resulting intellectual and moral carnage. Everything about Newman’s description—from its lucid diction and lofty tone to its praise of the dispassionate cultivation of the intellect—is an object of derision in the academy today. Likewise, Professor Searle’s insistence that the curriculum not be reduced to a tool for partisan propaganda, “leftist, rightist, centrist, or whatever,” is now widely derided as hopelessly naïve or insidiously reactionary.

The truth is that despite widespread concern about the fate of higher education, and despite many and various efforts to call attention to and remedy the situation, the situation is in many ways far graver today than it was in the 1970s and 1980s when exotic phenomena such as Afrocentrism, “Postcolonial Studies,” Queer Theory, Critical Legal Studies, and the attack on science by so-called humanists were just beginning to gather steam. And despite the rise of alternative voices here and there, those dominating the discussion at most institutions are committed to discrediting the traditional humanistic ideals of liberal education by injecting politics into the heart of the educational enterprise.

Consider the phenomena of “multiculturalism” and political correctness. (I use scare quotes because what generally travels under the name of “multiculturalism” is really a form of monocultural animus directed against the dominant culture.) The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact, they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable. Hence the sensitivity of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral vacuousness. Multiculturalism is a paralyzing intoxicant; its thrill centers around the emotion of superior virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of ignorance and blighted good intentions. As the essay by Alan Charles Kors shows, the crucial thing to understand about multiculturalism is that, notwithstanding its emancipationist rhetoric, “multiculturalism” is not about recognizing genuine cultural diversity or encouraging pluralism. It is about undermining the priority of Western liberal values in our educational system and in society at large. In essence, as the political scientist Samuel Huntington has pointed out, multicultur- alism is “anti-European civilization… . It is basically an anti-Western ideology.” The most ironic aspect of this whole spectacle is that what appears to its adherents as bravely anti-Western is in fact part of the West’s long tradition of self-scrutiny. Indeed, criticism of the West has been a prominent ingredient in the West’s self-understanding at least since Socrates invited his fellow Athenians to debate with him about the nature of the good life. No civilization in history has been as consistently self-critical as the West.

Anti-Americanism occupies such a prominent place on the agenda of the culture wars precisely because the traditional values of American identity—articulated by the Founders and grounded in a commitment to individual liberty and public virtue—are deeply at odds with the radical, de-civilizing tenets of the “multiculturalist” enterprise of political correctness. A profound ignorance of the milestones of American (or any other) culture is one predictable result. The statistics have become proverbial. Huntington quotes one poll from the 1990s showing that while 90 percent of Ivy League students could identify Rosa Parks, only 25 percent could identify the author of the words “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” (Yes, it’s the Gettysburg Address.) In a 1999 survey, 40 percent of seniors at fifty-five top colleges could not say within half a century when the Civil War was fought. Another study found that more high school students knew who Harriet Tubman was than knew that Washington commanded the American army in the Revolution or that Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation.

Political correctness also fosters an atmosphere of intimidation and encourages slavish moral and intellectual conformity, attacking the very basis for the free exchange of ideas. Even worse, it encourages a kind of intellectual sentimentality that makes it difficult to acknowledge certain unpalatable realities—the reality, for example, that not all cultures, or indeed all individuals, are equal in terms of potential or accomplishment. It insinuates that “lie in the soul” Socrates warned about in The Republic. The consequence, as Charles Murray sets out in his essay below, is a species of educational “romanticism” that may be motivated by good intentions but has disastrous results.

It almost goes without saying that the tenured or soon-to-be-tenured radicals now controlling nearly all of the most prestigious humanities departments in this country reply that their critics have overstated the case. Really, they say, there is nothing amiss, nothing has happened that need concern parents, trustees, alumni, government, or private funding sources. On the issue of enforcing politically correct behavior on campus, for example, they will assure you that the whole thing has been overblown by “conservative” journalists who do not sufficiently admire Edward Said and cannot appreciate that the free exchange of ideas must sometimes be curtailed for the higher virtue of protecting the feelings of designated victim groups. And the curriculum, they will say, has not been politicized, it has merely been democratized: opened up to reflect the differing needs and standards of groups and ideas hitherto insufficiently represented in the academy.

The aim of such objections is not to enlighten or persuade but to intimidate and pre-empt criticism. The truth is that what we are facing today is nothing less than the destruction of the fundamental premises that underlie our conception both of liberal education and of a liberal democratic polity. Respect for rationality and the rights of the individual; a commitment to the ideals of disinterested criticism and color-blind justice; advancement according to merit, not according to sex, race, or ethnic origin: these quintessentially Western ideas are bedrocks of our political as well as our educational system. And they are precisely the ideas that are now under attack by bien pensants academics intoxicated by the coercive possibilities generated by their self-infatuating embrace of political correctness.

One of the most depressing features of the long-running epic saga called “educational reform” is how intractable the problems seem. A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay in these pages called “Retaking the University.” One thoughtful internet commentator responded with an alternative that I must have had somewhere in the back of my mind but had never articulated explicitly. This forthright chap began by recalling an article on military affairs that poked fun at yesterday’s conventional wisdom that high-tech gear would render tanks and old-fashioned armor obsolete. Whatever else the war in Iraq showed, he observed, such tried and true military hardware was anything but obsolete. The moral is: some armor is good, more armor is better. “It makes sense,” this fellow concluded, “to have some tanks handy.”

He then segued into my piece on the university, outlining some of the criticisms and recommendations I’d made. By and large, he agreed with the criticisms, but he found my recommendations much too tame. “Try as I might,” he wrote, “I just can’t see meaningful change of the academic monstrosity our universities have become issuing from faculties, parents, alumni, and trustees.” What was his alternative? In a word, “Tanks!” He called his plan Operation Academic Freedom. It has that virtue of forthright simplicity:

We round up every tank we can find that isn’t actually being used in Iraq or Afghanistan. Next, we conduct a nationwide Internet poll to determine which institutions need to be retaken first… .

The actual battle plan is pretty simple. We drive our tanks up to the front doors of the universities and start shooting. Timing is important. We’ll have to wait till 11 A.M. or so, or else there won’t be anyone in class. Ammunition is important. We’ll need lots and lots of it. The firing plan is to keep blasting until there’s nothing left but smoldering ruins. Then we go on to the next on the list. If the first target is Harvard, for example, we would move on from there to, say, Yale. So fuel will be important too. There’s going to be some long distance driving involved between engagements.

Well, perhaps we can call that Plan B, a handy expedient if other proposals don’t pan out. And there have, let’s face it, been plenty of other proposals. The task of reforming higher education has become a vibrant cottage industry, with think tanks, conferences, special programs, institutes, and initiatives cropping up like mushrooms after a rain. I think, for example, of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University, The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or Robert George’s Madison Center at Princeton University, which has become a model for many seeking institutional reform.

Naturally, many of these initiatives tend to run into stiff resistance. In his melancholy essay below, Robert Paquette tells the sorry tale of attempting to start an Alexander Hamilton Center, dedicated to “excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism,” at Hamilton College in upstate New York. An obstreperous and politicized faculty intimidated a pusillanimous administration and the center had to be started off campus without college affiliation.

I applaud all of these initiatives. But I wonder what lasting effect they will have on the intellectual and moral life of the university. They are important in any event because, even if they remain relegated to the sidelines of academic life, they demonstrate that real alternatives to reflexive academic left-wingery are possible. I suspect, however, that they will remain minority enterprises, a handful of gadflies buzzing about the left-lunging behemoth that is contemporary academia. Why? There are several reasons.

One reason is that the left-wing monoculture is simply too deeply entrenched for these initiatives, laudable and necessary though they are, to make much difference. For the last few years, I have heard several commentators from sundry ideological points of view predict that the reign of political correctness and programmatic leftism on campus had peaked and was now about to recede. I wish I could share that optimism. I see no evidence of it. Sure, students are quiescent. But indifference is not instauration, and besides faculties nearly everywhere form a self-perpetuating closed shop.

Something similar can be said about the fashion of “theory”—all that anemic sex-in-the-head politicized gibberish dressed up in reader-proof “philosophical” prose. It is true that names like Derrida or Foucault no longer produce the frisson of excitement they once did. That is not because their “ideas” are widely disputed but rather because they are by now completely absorbed into the tissues of academic life. (The same thing happened with Freud a couple decades ago.)

A few years ago, The American Enterprise magazine created a small stir when it published “The Shame of America’s One-Party Campuses,” providing some statistical evidence to bolster what everyone already knew: that American colleges and universities were overwhelmingly left-wing. You know the story: out of 30 English professors at college X, 29 are left-leaning Democrats and one is an Independent while in the economics department of college Y, 33 profs are left-leaning Democrats and 1 is, or at least occasionally talks to, a Republican. Well, that’s all old hat now. A few months ago, the Yale Daily News ran a story revealing that faculty and staff at Yale this election cycle have contributed 45 times more to Democratic candidates than to Republications. “Most people in my department,” said the one doctor known to have contributed to Guiliani’s presidential campaign, “are slightly to the left of Joseph Stalin.”

The key issue, I hasten to add, is not partisan politics but rather the subordinating of intellectual life generally to non-intellectual, i.e., political imperatives. “The greatest danger,” the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote in “What are Universities For?,”

is the invasion of an intellectual fashion which wants to abolish cognitive criteria of knowledge and truth itself… . The humanities and social sciences have always succumbed to various fashions, and this seems inevitable. But this is probably the first time that we are dealing with a fashion, or rather fashions, according to which there are no generally valid intellectual criteria.

Indeed, it is this failure—the colonization of intellectual life by politics—that stands behind and fuels the degradation of liberal education. The issue is not so much—or not only—the presence of bad politics as the absence of non-politics in the intellectual life of the university.

I used to think that appealing over the heads of the faculty to trustees, parents, alumni, and other concerned groups could make a difference. I have become increasingly less sanguine about that strategy. For one thing, it is extremely difficult to generate a sense of emergency such that those groups will actually take action, let alone maintain the sense of emergency such that an outburst of indignation will develop into a call for action.

What’s more, those groups are increasingly impotent. Time was when a prospective hiccup in the annual fund would send shivers down the spine of an anxious college president. These days, many colleges and universities are so rich that they can afford to cock a snook at parents and alumni. Forget about Harvard and its $30 billion, or Princeton, or Yale, or Stanford, or the other super-rich schools. Even many small colleges are sitting on huge fortunes.

Consider tiny Hamilton College again. When Hamilton tried to hire Susan Rosenberg, the former Weather Underground member whose 58-year sentence was commuted by Bill Clinton on his last day in office, I reported the fact in The Wall Street Journal. The story appeared on the day that Hamilton kicked off a capital campaign in New York. My article was highly critical, and it generated a lot of comment. Donations to Hamilton, I am told, simply dried up. But so what? The college sits on an endowment of some $700 million. That is more than half a billion dollars. So what if the Annual Fund is down a few million this year? Big deal. They can afford to hunker down and wait out the outcry.

Some observers believe that the university can not really be reformed until the current generation—the Sixties generation—retires. That’s another couple of decades, minimum. And don’t forget about the self-replicating engine that is tenure in which like begets like. Deep and lasting change in the university depends on deep and lasting change in the culture at large. Effecting that change is a tall order. Criticism, satire, and ridicule all have an important role to play, but the point is that such criticism, to be successful, depends upon possessing an alternative vision of the good.

Do we possess that alternative vision? I believe we do. We all know, well enough, what a good liberal education looks like, just as we all know, well enough, what makes for a healthy society. It really isn’t that complicated. It doesn’t take a lot of money or sophistication. What it does require is patience, candidness, and courage, moral virtues that are in short supply wherever political correctness reigns triumphant. In large part, those who want to retake the university must devote themselves to a waiting game, capitalizing in the meanwhile on whatever opportunities present themselves. That is Plan A. Of course, it may fail; there are no guarantees. But in that case we can always avail ourselves of the more dramatic Plan B outlined above.

Roger Kimball is co-Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books.

Libera - "Ave Maria" (Caccini)

Buddy Witherspoon for US Senate

South Carolina has become painfully aware that the man they elected to succeed the legendary Strom Thurmond does not represent South Carolina values in the United States Senate.

As a recent article in The American Spectator makes clear, Lindsey Graham is far more comfortable espousing the views of his political allies Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, than he is representing the people that elected him. Indeed, he has been called the third Senator from Massachusetts.

The good news is that South Carolinians have a choice, and next month Republicans can nominate a true conservative, dedicated to liberty, sound fiscal policies, securing our border and eliminating illegal immigration. Buddy Witherspoon believes parents, not the government, should decide who will educate their children, and he believes marriage is a sacred institution ordained by God, that is the union of one man and one woman. He will also ensure that those appointed to the federal judiciary respect the Constitution of the United States as it was written by our founding fathers.

Buddy Witherspoon is a dedicated family man with decades of service to his community and our state. If you have not had the opportunity to meet him, the following is his schedule for the next few days.

Friday May 16th – News 19 WLTX – Columbia, Live TV Interview – 7:00pm – 7:30pm.

Monday May 19th – Aiken Republican Club Luncheon – 12:00pm – 1:00pm Newberry Hall, Aiken, SC. Buddy is the featured speaker.

Monday May 19th – Myrtle Beach Republican Club’s Whistle-Stop Candidate Forum – 5:30pm – 7:30pm. Myrtle Beach Train Depot, Myrtle Beach, SC. Buddy is a speaker at this event.

Monday May 19th – Waccamaw Neck GOP – 7:00pm – 8:00pmLibrary, Pawley’s Island, SC. Buddy is a speaker at this event.

Tuesday May 20th – Lancaster GOP Meeting – 7:00pm – 8:00pmUSC-Lancaster, Bradley Building, Lancaster, SC. Buddy is the featured speaker.

For the sake of your family and our state, please vote for Buddy Witherspoon in next month's Republican Primary and restore the kind of representation in Washington that our nation and our state need and deserve.

The Worst Republican Senator

From The American Spectator

By Quin Hillyer

South Carolina's Lindsey Graham is a flop. He pretends to be a conservative, but sells out conservatives and insults them while doing so. He pretends to be effective at reaching across party lines, but the only thing he effectively does is help the other party. He inhabits the Senate seat of Strom Thurmond, legendary for great attention to his South Carolina constituents, but Graham spends most of his time trailing behind John McCain like a valet as McCain criss-crosses the country in pursuit of the presidency. He called Ted Kennedy "one of the most principled men I've ever met." In sum, in the words of conservative movement stalwart Richard Viguerie, "Lindsey Graham is part of the problem.

"What, for example, could possibly have possessed Graham, in April of 2006, to write an essay for Time magazine about the virtues of Hillary Clinton? He called her "a smart, prepared, serious senator." She is "sought out by her colleagues to form legislative partnerships." She has managed to "build unusual political alliances with...conservatives.

"He praises liberals, but reserves particular venom for conservatives who disagree with him. The most infamous example came at a speech to the utterly radical Hispanic group La Raza -- it was bad enough that he spoke to them, much less what he said -- when he described what he would do to opponents of the awful immigration proposal he helped Ted Kennedy craft: "We're going to tell the bigots to shut up." The idea that only a bigot could oppose the Kennedy amnesty plan was a recurring theme with Graham: On This Week, he told George Stephanopoulos that opponents were like those in earlier years who put up signs that said "No Catholics, no Jews, no Irish need apply."

MEANWHILE, GRAHAM deserves every bit of abuse conservatives can heap on him for his record on judicial nominees, which swings back and forth between pathetically ineffective and absolutely counterproductive. Of his leading role in the "Gang of 14," which saved the Democrats' unprecedented option of filibustering President Bush's nominees, Graham clearly thought his gesture of goodwill would win him some chits with Democrats. Think again. Right now his home circuit, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, suffers from the most serious official "judicial emergency" in the country, with only 10 of the 15 seats filled.

Again and again, Graham has stood by helplessly, without seeming to lift a finger in public protest, as Fourth Circuit nominees have been hung out to dry -- except for the time (more on this later) when he himself was the enthusiastic hangman. Even though he sits on the Judiciary Committee, he cannot even secure a hearing for his home-state nominee, the superbly qualified, Reagan Administration veteran Steve Matthews, who has been waiting for eight solid months. On the other hand, more aggressive Republicans on the committee have had far more success: For instance, John Cornyn of Texas has effectively shepherded Texans Jennifer Elrod and Catherina Hayes to confirmation since the Democrats re-took the Senate majority -- and without once sucking up to the Democrats to do it.

In a conference call with conservative bloggers and reporters a few weeks back, Graham defended the Gang thusly: "It was about a process. It was about whether we were going to change the rules to get a simple majority vote to get approval for the bench. If you change the rules, you weaken the Senate." But he had it backwards. It was the Democrats who had thrown out the understanding of the rules that had applied for 214 years, an understanding that it was exactly a "simple majority" that was all that was necessary for confirmation. It was to restore the proper understanding of the rules that Republican leaders threatened the "constitutional option" against Democratic filibusters -- and it was Graham who saved the day for the Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Gang at least was supposed to make it somewhat easier to confirm judges by ruling out filibusters except in "extraordinary circumstances." It didn't work. Before the Gang, when there were just 51 Republican senators, the Senate approved 19 of 31 appeals court nominees. After the Gang, even with a larger bloc of 55 Republicans in the Senate, the confirmation rate was actually lower: just 16 out of 28. What's worse, other than the three nominees immediately approved through the Gang's deal, the few other post-Gang nominees who were approved tended to be less solidly conservative than the ones approved in the previous Congress.

And, of course, once the Democrats re-took a the majority, none of the Gang's supposed goodwill did any good: So far this Congress the Senate has confirmed just seven appellate nominees, and just one this year -- again, without Graham making much of a peep about it.

GRAHAM'S WORST ACTIONS on this front, though, came when he led the fight against South Carolina native Jim Haynes for a Fourth Circuit spot, supposedly because Haynes advocated "torture" at Guantanamo Bay. That issue has been well covered here, here, and here. In just the past month, though, new releases of Justice Department documents show conclusively that the impetus for the enhanced "stress positions" at Guantanamo came from Justice, and in stronger fashion even than had previously been known, to Haynes; and fair consideration of those memos make it all the more clear that Haynes' subsequent actions to make the interrogation methods more lenient should have earned him Graham's praise, not his calumny.

Less well known than Graham's apostasies against conservatism on judges and immigration was his horrendous performance when President Bush was pushing personal accounts for Social Security. After putting himself forward as Bush's point man in the Senate, he failed to make any headway -- and then it became obvious why: Graham never really cared about personal accounts to begin with. "We've now got this huge fight over a sideshow," Graham told Washington Post reporters and editors. "It's always been a sideshow, but we sold it as the main event." Added Graham: "we're off in a ditch over a sideshow." He said this in March of 2005, directly undercutting Bush while Bush was still just getting fully geared up to fight the good fight for this crucial conservative reform. By the end of that month, he was pushing his own plan for what the Post called "significant tax increases" to make Social Security solvent.

Graham also has an absolutely terrible record on tort reform, not just voting against GOP-backed reforms but actually joining filibusters against them. As class-action plaintiffs' attorneys terrorize businesses and doctors with spurious lawsuits seeking jackpot justice, Lindsey Graham roots them on.

On family issues, the conservative Eagle Forum gave him just a 44% rating in 2006. That same year he did terribly by the lights of the English First, which explains itself thusly: "Our goals are simple: Make English America's official language. Give every child the chance to learn English. Eliminate costly and ineffective multilingual policies." Graham received just a 25% rating from the group.

"Graham doesn't seem to have any conservative vision," Viguerie said. "He doesn't seem to walk with conservatives. I'm not aware of any movement conservatives on his staff."

But for South Carolina's senior senator, who needs conservatives when getting in the good graces of Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy is so much fun?

Quin Hillyer is an associate editor at the Washington Examiner and a senior editor of The American Spectator. He can be reached at qhillyer@gmail.com.

Irena Sendler, 98; Member of Resistance Saved Lives of 2,500 Polish Jews

From the Los Angeles Times
By Elaine Woo

Fate may have led Irena Sendler to the moment almost 70 years ago when she began to risk her life for the children of strangers. But for this humble Polish Catholic social worker, who was barely 30 when one of history's most nightmarish chapters unfolded before her, the pivotal influence was something her parents had drummed into her.

"I was taught that if you see a person drowning," she said, "you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not."

Irena Sendler

When the Nazis occupying Poland began rounding up Jews in 1940 and sending them to the Warsaw ghetto, Sendler plunged in.

With daring and ingenuity, she saved the lives of more than 2,500 Jews, most of them children, a feat that went largely unrecognized until the last years of her life.

Sendler, 98, who died of pneumonia Monday in Warsaw, has been called the female Oskar Schindler, but she saved twice as many lives as the German industrialist, who sheltered 1,200 of his Jewish workers. Unlike Schindler, whose story received international attention in the 1993 movie "Schindler's List," Sendler and her heroic actions were almost lost to history until four Kansas schoolgirls wrote a play about her nine years ago.

The lesson Sendler taught them was that "one person can make a difference," Megan Felt, one of the authors of the play, said Monday.

"Irena wasn't even 5 feet tall, but she walked into the Warsaw ghetto daily and faced certain death if she was caught. Her strength and courage showed us we can stand up for what we believe in, as well," said Felt, who is now 23 and helps raise funds for aging Holocaust rescuers.

Sendler was born Feb. 15, 1910, in Otwock, a small town southeast of Warsaw. She was an only child of parents who devoted much of their energies to helping workers.

She was especially influenced by her father, a doctor who defied anti-Semites by treating sick Jews during outbreaks of typhoid fever. He died of the disease when Sendler was 9.

She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker in Warsaw when the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto and built a wall separating it from the rest of the city, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Social workers were not allowed inside the ghetto, but Sendler, imagining "the horror of life behind the walls," obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a nurse, allowed to bring in food, clothes and medicine.

By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis had become clear, Sendler joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota. She recruited 10 close friends -- a group that would eventually grow to 25, all but one of them women -- and began rescuing Jewish children.

She and her friends smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks and coffins, sedating babies to quiet their cries. Some were spirited away through a network of basements and secret passages. Operations were timed to the second. One of Sendler's children told of waiting by a gate in darkness as a German soldier patrolled nearby. When the soldier passed, the boy counted to 30, then made a mad dash to the middle of the street, where a manhole cover opened and he was taken down into the sewers and eventually to safety.

Decades later, Sendler was still haunted by the parents' pleas, particularly of those who ultimately could not bear to be apart from their children.

"The one question every parent asked me was 'Can you guarantee they will live?' We had to admit honestly that we could not, as we did not even know if we would succeed in leaving the ghetto that day. The only guarantee," she said, "was that the children would most likely die if they stayed."

Most of the children who left with Sendler's group were taken into Roman Catholic convents, orphanages and homes and given non-Jewish aliases. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper in the hope that she could reunite them with their families later. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend's garden.

In 1943, she was captured by the Nazis and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried. She also resisted in other ways. According to Felt, when Sendler worked in the prison laundry, she and her co-workers made holes in the German soldiers' underwear. When the officers discovered what they had done, they lined up all the women and shot every other one. It was just one of many close calls for Sendler.

During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs, and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape. The officer added her name to a list of executed prisoners. Sendler went into hiding but continued her rescue efforts.

Felt said that Sendler had begun her rescue operation before she joined the organized resistance and helped a number of adults escape, including the man she later married. "We think she saved about 500 people before she joined Zegota," Felt said, which would mean that Sendler ultimately helped rescue about 3,000 Polish Jews.

When the war ended, Sendler unearthed the jars and began trying to return the children to their families. For the vast majority, there was no family left. Many of the children were adopted by Polish families; others were sent to Israel.

In 1965, she was recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust authority, as a Righteous Gentile, an honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Nazi reign.

Her status began to change in 2000, when Felt and her classmates learned that the woman who had inspired them was still alive. Through the sponsorship of a local Jewish organization, they traveled to Warsaw in 2001 to meet Sendler, who helped the students improve and expand the play. Called "Life in a Jar," it has been performed more than 250 times in the United States, Canada and Poland and generated media attention that cast a spotlight on the wizened, round-faced nonagenarian.

After each performance, Felt and the other cast members passed a jar for Sendler, raising enough money to move her into a Catholic nursing home with round-the-clock care. They and the teacher who assigned them the play project, Norman Conard, started the Life in a Jar Foundation, which has raised more than $70,000 to help pay for medical and other needs of Holocaust rescuers.

Last year, Sendler was honored by the Polish Senate and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, which brought dozens of reporters to her door. She told one of them she was wearying of the attention.

"Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth," she said, "and not a title to glory."

Sendler, who was the last living member of her group of rescuers, is survived by a daughter and a granddaughter.

For more information on Irena Sendler, or to contribute to the Life In a Jar Foundation, go to http://www.irenasendler.org/

Global Day of Action for Burma - May 17

On Saturday, May 17, 2008, a Global Day of Action for a critical response to the Burmese humanitarian disaster will take place in cities around the world. Demonstrations and vigils will be held to urge world governments and the United Nations to take action now and save countless lives at this crucial time for the people affected by Cyclone Nargis.

Despite the devastation and deaths wrought by the cyclone in the immediate aftermath of its landfall, the humanitarian tragedy playing out in Burma may only be beginning. Burma’s military regime has blocked the international aid effort to such an extent that 1.5 million people are at risk of dying from starvation, dehydration and communicable diseases. The scale of the desolation is incomprehensibly huge: thousands of homes have been destroyed, Burma’s rice-growing heartland has been rendered fallow due to flooding, and tens of thousands are already dead. It is, without a doubt, the worst natural disaster to strike Asia - perhaps the world - since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

HOLD A FUNDRAISER, HOLD A VIGIL, WRITE TO YOUR LEGISLATORS

Here's what else you can do:

1. Donate for Cyclone Relief

2. Host an event for the Global Day of Action, May 17th

3. Urge US, UK, and France to send aid in now

4. Pledge to Not Watch the Beijing Olympics

5. Hold an event for Aung San Suu Kyi’s Birthday

6. Inform your community about the crisis in eastern Burma

7. Join your local Burma chapter, or if there isn’t one start your own

Bob Barr Announces Candidacy for President of the United States

From Barr '08 Website

"Bob Barr represented the 7th District of Georgia in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, serving as a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, as Vice-Chairman of the Government Reform Committee, and as a member of the Committee on Financial Services. He now runs a consulting firm, Liberty Strategies LLC, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and with offices in the Washington, D.C. area.

Bob Barr chose to join the Libertarian Party because at this time in our nation’s history, it is essential to join and work with a party that is 100 percent committed to protecting liberty.

Bob Barr has served as Regional Representative of the Libertarian National Committee.

Bob Barr works tirelessly to help preserve our fundamental right to privacy and our other civil liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Along with this, Bob is committed to helping elect leaders who will strive for smaller government, lower taxes and abundant individual freedom.

Bob Barr also occupies the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union, and is a Board Member of the National Rifle Association. Bob Barr is also a member of The Constitution Project’s Initiative on Liberty and Security, and he served from 2003 to 2005 as a member of a project at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University addressing matters of privacy and security. In fact, recognizing Bob Barr’s leadership in privacy matters, New York Times columnist William Safire has called him “Mr. Privacy.”

Bob Barr was appointed by President Reagan to serve as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia (1986-90), and served as President of Southeastern Legal Foundation (1990-91). He was an official with the CIA (1971-78), and has practiced law for many years."

A Schism over Shari'a in the Church of England

From American Thinker
By David J. Rusin

The debate over the trajectory of the Western sociopolitical system and its strained relations with Islam is the most pivotal of our time, as approaches decided upon today will impact billions not yet born. Two prelates in the ever more fractious Church of England provide a microcosm of this discourse.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali have emerged as central combatants in the dispute between two fundamentally opposed models of social organization: multiculturalism and universalism. The former bestows equal standing upon different cultures in the public square. The latter bestows equal standing upon individuals who wield a common set of rights and responsibilities. Which system prevails will ultimately determine the level of danger that homegrown Islamists pose to Britain, Europe, and the broader West.

Nazir-Ali believes that Britain's campaign to reconstitute itself as a multicultural society has failed, and he explained why in a January 6 op-ed. By emphasizing differences over common values, his country has promoted alienation among Muslims, many of whom are "living as separate communities, continuing to communicate in their own languages, and having minimum need for building healthy relationships with the majority." Since segregation breeds extremism, Islamist-dominated "no-go areas" now dot the map.

Indeed, as Britain increasingly accommodates the strictures of Islamic law in both welfare and finance, the radicalization of its Muslims continues apace. According to a 2006 Channel 4 survey, nearly one-quarter see the 7/7 London bombings as justifiable. A 2007 Policy Exchange poll found that 40% of Muslims under 24 prefer to be governed by Shari'a, while a shocking 36% believe that apostates from Islam should be "punished by death." Extremist views are far more common among younger Muslims, portending trouble on the horizon.

The death threats that followed Nazir-Ali's essay only bolstered his thesis. "The irony is that I had similar threats when I was a bishop in Pakistan," he noted, "but I never thought I would have them here." The rejection of reason is particularly disturbing to this learned man: "If you disagree, that must be met by counterarguments, not by trying to silence people. It was a threat not just to me, but to my family. ... It gave me sleepless nights."

Rowan Williams was likewise losing sleep -- over the "damage" done by Nazir-Ali's frank assessment of multicultural pieties. Speaking to the BBC on February 7, he ignited a firestorm of his own by suggesting that the official acceptance of some facets of Shari'a not only "seems unavoidable," but could actually improve social cohesion. To Williams, the idea that "there's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts -- I think that's a bit of a danger."

In one sentence, Britain's most influential cleric effectively discarded the primary achievement of Western civilization: a system in which all live as equals before a single standard of law. The logical consequences of his worldview were underscored by Melanie Phillips: "If there is no one law, there is no one national identity and therefore no society but instead a set of warring fiefdoms with their own separate jurisdictions."

Williams and Nazir-Ali also illustrate how one's preferred method of social organization -- multiculturalism or universalism -- frequently boils down to whether one acknowledges the righteousness of the Western enterprise. Preoccupation with the real and imagined crimes of the West can serve as a gateway to Islamist apologetics. And the archbishop is Exhibit A.

Regarding the free market, Williams sees only suffering: "Every transaction in the developed economies of the West can be interpreted as an act of aggression against the economic losers in the worldwide game." And America's role on the international stage is, of course, the height of iniquity. In contrast, he often excuses horrors committed in the name of Islam. While condemning terrorism, he has suggested that terrorists can "have serious moral goals." He also laments the challenges faced by Middle Eastern Christians, but portrays them as victims of Western policies rather than of the Islamists threatening their lives.

Unlike Rowan Williams, Michael Nazir-Ali witnessed the realities of Shari'a law and radical Islam firsthand as a young Pakistani. These experiences eventually led him to Britain's shores -- and to an admiration for the freedoms nurtured in the West. Like Magdi Allam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Salman Rushdie, and Ibn Warraq, the future bishop escaped the stifling oppression of Shari'a to become an outspoken champion of Western values.

Shari'a "would be in tension with the English legal tradition on questions like monogamy, provisions for divorce, the rights of women, custody of children, laws of inheritance and of evidence," Nazir-Ali said in response to Williams' BBC interview. "This is not to mention the relation of freedom of belief and of expression to provisions for blasphemy and apostasy." His statement reveals a keen understanding of the two groups that suffer an inferior status under Shari'a: women and non-Muslims.

Not satisfied with abstract musings, Nazir-Ali applies this knowledge to contemporary problems. In March he quizzed a Home Office minister on whether women threatened by forced marriages are being adequately protected, and last year he urged Muslim leaders to condemn violence against apostates. Williams, in contrast, has said little about either issue. The bishop of Rochester has also criticized amplification of the call to prayer, demanded that Britain carefully scrutinize foreign imams, and spoken out against face-covering veils -- even as Williams insists that an attempt to limit them would be "politically dangerous."

Nazir-Ali contends that the Western ethos did not arise by chance, but proceeded from "the Bible's teaching that we have equal dignity and freedom because we are all made in God's image." Islamist encroachments are therefore symptoms of a more fundamental problem. "The real danger to Britain today is the spiritual and moral vacuum that has occurred for the last 40 or 50 years. When you have such a vacuum something will fill it," he recently warned. "Do the British people really want to lose that rooting in the Christian faith that has given them everything they cherish -- art, literature, architecture, institutions, the monarchy, their value system, their laws?"

Only time will tell.

Historians may one day look back on these two prelates and the church they serve -- a body faced with plummeting attendance and approaching disestablishment -- as symbols of the early twenty-first-century discourse over the future of the West. For now, Michael Nazir-Ali and Rowan Williams illuminate the diverging paths before us: one paved with an ardent defense of Western liberties, the other with a nihilism that leads inexorably to dhimmitude.

David J. Rusin is a research associate at Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania. Please feel free to contact him at rusin@meforum.org.

The Exmoor Singers - "Spirit of God"

What’s Going Right in Europe – How Localism Might Save the Continent

The following article by the Flemish journalist, Paul Belien, is an encouraging reminder that there are ethnic and historical currents moving in Europe that may be more powerful than the socialist, totalitarian EU folly. Since publication of Mr. Belien's article a fortnight ago, conservatives have made enormous gains in Britain and Italy and control the mayoral offices of London and Rome for the first time since the Second World War.

From The Brussels Journal
By Paul Belien

Following the victory of Silvio Berlusconi’s rightist alliance in Italy, The Economist wrote a condescending editorial, entitled “Mamma mia.” The article stated that Berlusconi was not The Economist’s choice and said that the “Italians may come to regret electing [the jester of Italian politics] once again.” Barely a month earlier, Spain had re-elected its own “jester,” Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a man whose main ambition is to destroy Spain’s Christian heritage and substitute it with a postmodern, multicultural utopia where homosexuals marry and the state raises children. At that election, however, The Economist did not feel compelled to snub the winner. It just told its readers that Spain needs “a bipartisan approach to […] solve big questions of national identity.”

Italy and Spain are two frontline states on Europe’s southern border. They are being overrun by millions (no exaggeration) of immigrants, many of whom cross the straits in boats from the African shore of the Mediterranean. Three years ago Spain (40 million inhabitants) announced a collective amnesty for a staggering 800,000 undocumented aliens, despite having already offered six other amnesties in the past 15 years. Two years ago, Italy (58 million inhabitants) amnestied 500,000 illegal immigrants, having already offered five similar regularizations between 1988 and 2006. And still the immigrants keep coming. Immigration, however, is not the “big question of national identity” The Economist is referring to.

Obviously, economics is mostly on The Economist’s mind. Consequently, economic reform is what the above editorials mainly dealt with, though in Spain’s case the magazine also mentioned the “national identity” question in a reference to the seats won by regionalist and separatist parties from Catalonia and the Basque country. These parties kept Mr Zapatero from an absolute majority in the Spanish parliament. Hence, he will have to accommodate them in some way.

Strangely–though tellingly for a magazine which, like The Economist, is representative of Europe’s mainstream media—the editorial on Italy did not mention the astonishing electoral success of the Lega Nord, a constituent of Mr. Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance.

Like the parties in Catalonia and the Basque country, the Northern League (full name: Lega Nord per l’Indipendenza della Padania—Northern League for the Independence of Padania) is a regionalist, indeed separatist, party. Padania, in case you have never heard of it, does not exist as a nation; it is the collective name that the League uses to denote the various regions of northern Italy (such as Lombardy, Piedmont, Venice, Tuscany, South Tyrol, and others). The League is made up of several parties (including the Lega Lombarda, the Liga Veneta, the Alleanza Toscana) that want to restore to their regions the sovereignty that they enjoyed prior to the formation of the Italian State in the 19th century.

The success of the Northern League was the pivotal element in the victory of Mr. Berlusconi’s alliance. It enabled him to win an absolute majority in the Italian parliament. The League completely wiped away the left in the north. It doubled in size and won a stunning 8.3% of the national vote, sending 60 deputies (+37) and 26 senators (+13) to Rome. In some northern regions, it had the support of up to 50% of the electorate. This remarkable result, however, was not worth the consideration of The Economist, or of the rest of the European media. As they did not report on the League’s victory, they did not need to explain to their readers why the party had done so extraordinary well. Indeed, the international media preferred to lament the return of “the jester” rather than point out that the Northern League won so massively because of its forceful anti-immigration platform.

On Monday (21 April), the leftist Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera wrote, “Fear boosted the Northern League’s vote, doubling and tripling its haul in front-line towns where local prosperity is undermined by thefts and burglaries. Unpunished crimes generate anger and people lose trust.” It is telling that even this leftist newspaper talks about “front-line” towns–-as if a war is going on—to describe the blue-collar areas around Milan where immigrants are making life unbearable for indigenous workers who no longer feel at home in their own neighborhoods. Roberto Mura, the League’s secretary for the district of Pavia and the mayor of San Genesio, 25 kilometers south of Milan, told the Corriere: “We struggle to shake off […] the image of the rough and ready, apolitical racist League militant. […] I know we’ve got to live with immigration, but the rules have to be respected. The League has been saying so for fifteen years. We’re now reaping the reward for the coherence and clarity of our project to defend the territory.”

As Mr Mura points out, the “apolitical” Northern League is in politics not for the sake of politics itself, but to “defend the territory.” There is something remarkable going on here, though it will never hit the mainstream media because the latter do not want to see it:

The most successful anti-immigration parties in Europe are regionalist/secessionist parties. They are “apolitical” because they do not particularly like politics. Their militants, members and voters do not like the state, they want to be left alone. They defend local communities that want to run their own affairs. They are parties of the land and the community, rather than the state. They are, as the media and the political establishment derisively call them, “populists.”

Milan, the capital of Lombardy, is 700 kilometers (430 miles) to the south of Brussels, the seat of the European Union, that supranational European superstate in the making which already accounts for 75% of the legislation in its 27 member states. The League is as opposed to Brussels as it is to Rome: it’s regionalist, restrictionist, and “Eurosceptic,” meaning that it doesn’t much like supranational mingling in local affairs.

Let us now travel from Milan to Brussels. First we must cross the Lombardian border into Switzerland, then we cross the Alps in order to reach the valley of the Rhine River. We follow the Rhine, which constitutes the border between France and Germany, until we arrive in the Low Countries, in particular in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium, where Brussels is situated. There, we can visit the buildings of the European and the Belgian parliaments but also those of the Flemish Regional Parliament.

The largest party in the latter parliament is the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) party. It represents a quarter of the Flemish electorate and is considered one of the most professional and successful of Europe’s patriotic parties. It is remarkably similar to the Lega Nord. It is separatist, in favor of restricting immigration and Eurosceptic.

The VB was founded in 1978 by Flemish nationalists aiming for the independence of Flanders. The Flemish provinces are the historic southern, Catholic half of the Netherlands. In fact, the Flemish provinces belonged to the Netherlands until the International Powers gave them to the newly created French-dominated state of Belgium in 1831. From the start, the VB warned against immigration by people from a culture entirely alien to that of Flanders; indeed, the VB was the first party to address the issue. It still demands that immigrants assimilate and, hence, that their numbers remain low enough to assure that this is possible. The party’s position is also that immigration from countries with a culture closer to that of Flanders should be given preference, but they have to adapt to the locals and learn the language of the Flemings, Dutch.

The VB is critical of immigration for exactly the same reason why it demands Flemish independence: because it wants to preserve Flemish national identity. As Frank Vanhecke, the then VB leader, wrote in The Flemish Republic in July 2003: “We defend the Flemish national identity, against the Belgian state as well as against immigrants who abuse our hospitality to wage an anti-Western war in Flanders. The VB is a party of Flemish patriots, prepared to defend Flanders’ culture and traditions, its values and, above all, its freedom.”

The Flemish provinces experienced their heyday in the Middle Ages, when the Netherlands was a confederate cluster of autonomous provinces. The provinces were dominated by powerful cities, such as Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels, who made it quite clear to the nominal dynastic ruler that he had to leave the burghers in peace or face rebellion. In northern Italy, the situation was almost similar, with powerful city-states running their own affairs. And so it was all along the 700 kilometers that we have just traveled. The cities along the Rhein, such as Cologne and Strasbourg, enjoyed considerable autonomy, while Switzerland was a confederation of tiny, sovereign republics of Alpine farmers. This was not a coincidence. In fact, these regions have a common history that goes back to the time when Charlemagne’s empire was divided, almost 1,200 years ago.

Charlemagne, king of the Franks, a Germanic tribe, conquered most of continental Western Europe and was crowned Emperor in 800 AD. He was the first ruler France and Germany had in common. His son, Louis the Pious, was the last. In 843, the Carolingian empire was divided. Charlemagne’s grandsons, Charles the Bald and Louis the German, became the first kings of, respectively, France (West Francia) and Germany (East Francia). There was, however, a third brother, Lothar, the eldest. He inherited the lands that lay between those of his brothers: Middle Francia.

Lothar’s kingdom was named after him: Lotharii Regnum or Lorraine. Today, Lorraine is the name of a province in the east of France. It is the province where Joan of Arc, France’s national heroine came from. However, contemporary Lorraine is only a tiny part of the Lorraine of old. In Lothar’s time, Lorraine comprised all the countries that lie between France and Germany today—the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland—plus the eastern part of present-day France, the western part of Germany and the northern half of Italy.

When Lothar’s son died without offspring in 875, the middle territories were divided between Charles the Bald and Louis the German. However, as these regions lay on the periphery of their heartlands, generations of kings of France and Germany were never able to establish a firm rule over them. The result was that throughout the Middle Ages, and for some up to the 18th century and even today, the lands of Lothar, Old Lorraine, were made up of self-governing republics of farmers, independent counties controlled by burghers or city republics.

Self-governing, with little interference from greedy princes, their tax controllers and meddling civil servants, these lands became very prosperous. Capitalism has its origins here. This whole axis from Amsterdam in the north to Siena in the south developed into the economic spine of Europe. The former Carolingian Middle Lands saw not only the birth of capitalism but also of limited government. A decentralized political culture developed where the burghers governed themselves without caring much about faraway rulers.

Later, and gradually, French and German monarchs succeeded in bringing most of the regions of the ancient Middle-Frankish realm under their control. The kings of France and Prussia succeeded in subduing their part of the Rhen region. The French Revolution swept away all the existing self-governing systems, and after the fall of Napoleon only Switzerland returned to its old constitutional order. To a large extent, however, the spirit of Old Lorraine lives on today in the lands of the former Middle Kingdom where citizens are still influenced by centuries of independence, self-reliance and adherence to a local identity that opposes centralizing authorities in far-away capitals.

In Switzerland, the only remaining sovereign part of Old Lorraine (at least until Flanders and Padania regain their independence), these feelings are so strong that the country stubbornly refuses to become a member of the European Union. Switzerland itself is a regionalist nation, made up of 26 provinces (cantons) that to a very large extent rule themselves. The country has strict immigration laws and the Swiss want to make these even stricter. The last elections, in November 2007, were won by the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party, SVP), which with 29% of the votes reinforced its position as the biggest party in the country. The international media describe the SVP as “far-right,” “populist,” “xenophobic” and “intolerant.” Like the Vlaams Belang and the Lega Nord, the SVP is localist. It combines a strong attachment to local communities with a clear affirmation of the right of these communities to “defend the territory” and preserve their own, traditional, ethnic identity.

Most of the regionalist parties in Europe, such as those in the Basque country, Scotland and elsewhere, are leftist. Except along the “spine of Europe.” These parties are the most successful of the parties of the European right. They have a localist quality, and yet they are fighting to protect the Christian, Western heritage of the continent as a whole. The SVP is currently campaigning for a referendum, on 1 June, to “stop mass naturalization” of immigrants. Italy’s new Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, comes from the Northern League and has announced “tough measures against clandestine immigration.” The VB, under constant harassment by the Belgian authorities, is working on a project to export its model to neighboring countries. Last January, the party established an international network called “Cities against Islamization,” in which it has aligned itself with local parties in cities along the Rhine—Pro Köln (Pro Cologne) from Cologne in the German Rhineland and Alsace d’Abord (Alsace First) from Strassbourg, the capital of Alsace, the French Rhine province. Like the VB, these parties defend local interests and oppose Islamization.

While France succumbs to North Africans and Germany to Turks, the parties from Old Lorraine, the spine of Europe, are preparing to fight for the preservation of their own identity. Owing to the massive immigration by people from an entirely different culture, many ordinary Europeans no longer feel at home in their own countries. Home is that cosy, often small, place where people feel safe among those whom they know and trust. The fight for the preservation of Europe is a fight for one’s own home, village, town, city, provence. That is why it is a localist issue.

Resistance to Islamization is not a matter of ideology, as one prominent American “anti-Jihadist” seems to think. The successful resistance in Europe has a provincial and an ethnic basis. It is about the right of the Europeans to hand their traditions, their identity, their cultural heritage down to their children so that the latter can continue to enjoy Europe’s ancient freedoms. The spirit of Old Lorraine has survived for 1,200 years. “Populist” parties in Flanders, Switzerland, Lombardia, Cologne and Alsace and other regions along the spine of Europe are popular for the simple reason that they are not prepared to let twelve centuries of capitalist self-reliance, self-governance and limited government fade away simply because foreigners are moving in with a spirit adapted to Arabian desert life.

“It is the wrong way to fight the global jihad,” writes the American anti-Islamist. “To form one group for indigenous Europeans, as has been done in several countries, reduces virtually every issue to the one non-negotiable issue of race and ethnicity, discourages cooperation, and thus encourages Balkanization, works against the idea of representative government, and obscures the common values of Judeo-Christian civilization that are shared by people of many races and ethnicities.”

Ethnicity, however, is not by definition a racial concept; it is a cultural one. Ethnicity is about the spirit, the culture that we share. For the above parties this culture is precisely the culture of limited government, of the common values of Western civilization, the adherence to home. Is all this bad because it is indigenous rather than ideological?


Paul Belien is a Flemish journalist. He is the founder of The Brussels Journal. His wife is a member of the Belgian parliament for Vlaams Belang. This article was first published by Takimag.com on April 27, 2008 .

The Fragile Greatness of America

From The Anchor

By Father Roger J. Landry

Pope Benedict came to the United States not merely to speak with Catholics and call them to a new Pentecost. He came to speak to all Americans: to remind us who we are, what our particular cultural and political inheritance is, and inspire us to treasure, protect and advance it.

For Benedict, the greatest part of that inheritance is the way our constitution and culture has protected religious freedom. In an interview on the plane coming to our country, the Holy Father said that America's founding fathers understood and applied a crucial paradox: that the best way to preserve religious freedom was to have a secular state.

"What I find fascinating in the United States," he told the journalists flying with him, "is that they began with a positive concept of secularism,because this new people was formed by communities and people who had fled from the state churches and wanted to have a lay state, secular, that would open possibilities to all confessions, for all the types of religious exercise. In this way, an intentionally secular state was born: they were against a state church... precisely out of love for religion in its authenticity, which can be lived only with liberty."

He said that the positive American understanding of secularism contrasts sharply with the negative European secularism flowing from the French revolution, which has tried to eliminate faith from public life rather than create the conditions for its flourishing. The American version, he affirmed, is a "fundamental model" for Europe. At the same time, he noted that there is a tension in the United States today, by those who subscribe to the original American positive secularism and those - like the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and other movements and individuals - who are trying to advance the negative European ideal.

In his meeting with the bishops, the Pope elaborated on the uniqueness of this "positive secularism" and the need to protect it. "It strikes me as significant that here in America, unlike many places in Europe, the secular mentality has not been intrinsically opposed to religion. Within the context of the separation of Church and State, American society has always been marked by a fundamental respect for religion and its public role, and, if polls are to be believed, the American people are deeply religious. But it is not enough to count on this traditional religiosity and go about business as usual, even as its foundations are being slowly undermined."

He then described that the foundations of this aspect of American greatness are being weakened by a growing reductionist understanding of how much faith should be allowed to influence one's public life. This new conception"allows for professing belief in God ... but at the same time it can subtly reduce religious belief to a lowest common denominator. Faith becomes a passive acceptance that certain things 'out there; are true, but without practical relevance for everyday life. The result is a growing separation of faith from life: living 'as if God did not exist.'"

If this corruption of the positive American secularism continues - whereby faith becomes a civic virtue rather than leads to moral virtues - then the entire American experiment in self-government is endangered. This is not an exclusively papal insight, but, as the Pope himself noted, the clear conclusion of Presidents Washington and Adams as well as Alexis deTocqueville. The 265th pope quoted the first president, who in his farewell address said that "religion and morality represent indispensable supports of political prosperity," and added, "Democracy can only flourish, as your founding fathers realized, when political leaders and those whom they represent are guided by truth and bring the wisdom born of firm moral principle to decisions affecting the life and future of the nation."

Perhaps the greatest homage to the wisdom of the founding fathers and the greatest call to defend and advance the positive American notion of secularism - both in the U.S. and elsewhere - occurred when Pope Benedict addressed the United Nations. He didn't mention the U.S. by name, but instead gave an impassioned defense of human rights in general and the right to religious freedom in particular - the very foundations on which the founding fathers built our country.

"It is inconceivable," Benedict declared, "that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves - their faith - in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one's rights." This type of denial occurs in atheistic communist countries and religiously fundamentalist states.

Benedict, however, added that there is another form of the denial of religious liberty that occurs in some secularist states, which religious liberty is understood only as the right to worship.

"The full guarantee of religious liberty," he asserted, "cannot be limited to the free exercise of worship, but has to give due consideration to the public dimension of religion, and hence to the possibility of believers playing their part in building the social order ... through influential and generous involvement in a vast network of initiatives which extend from universities, scientific institutions and schools to health care agencies and charitable organizations in the service of the poorest and most marginalized. Refusal to recognize the contribution to society that is rooted in the religious dimension and in the quest for the Absolute - by its nature, expressing communion between persons - would effectively privilege an individualistic approach, and would fragment the unity of the person." In other words, respect for religious liberty does not mean merely giving space for the person to worship on a given holy day in accordance with the person's conscience; it means allowing that person's faith to be able to influence his or her life seven days a week.

One clear application of this is in the realm of politics. In his meeting with the U.S. bishops, Pope Benedict praised the fact that, historically,Americans "do not hesitate to bring moral arguments rooted in biblical faith into their public discourse." This has allowed America to have the steady doses of salt, light and leaven that have prevented the social and moral disintegration that afflicts countries marked by relativist understandings of the truth.

But this American treasure is always fragile. "The preservation of freedom,"the Pope says, "calls for the cultivation of virtue, self-discipline, sacrifice for the common good and a sense of responsibility towards the less fortunate. It also demands the courage to engage in civic life and to bring one's deepest beliefs and values to reasoned public debate. In a word, freedom is ever new. It is a challenge held out to each generation, and it must constantly be won over for the cause of good."

For that reason, "the task of upholding religious freedom is never completed." Now it's our generation's turn to protect, uphold and advance it against the conceptions and practices that seek to undermine it.

King's Singers -- "You Are The New Day"

The Siege of Czestochowa

From the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property
By Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

Preliminary Note: The account of the siege of Czestochowa which we present here is based on the Memoirs of the Siege of Czestochowa by Father Augustine Kordecki (Pamietnik oblezenia Czestochowy, edited and with a preface by Jan Tokarski, London, Veritas, 1956) Written by Friar Kordecki in response to a wish of King Casimir, these memoirs were originally published in Latin.

"When God the most High decided to chastise the Poles, in His goodness He first sent various signs warning of the catastrophe which approached."

So He permitted that, the 10th of February 1654, the high tower of the Sanctuary of Czestochowa be struck by lighting and consumed by fire.

In that same year, on the 9th of July, everyone saw a miracle which occurred in the face of the sun: "In the nose of the sun there appeared a cross, which gradually became transformed into a heart, this latter pieced by a sword moved to one side and halted at the position of an eye. In the place of the other eye, one saw a hand holding a mace, which moved toward the forehead, dividing into four parts, and then on reaching the rim of the solar disk, became a scourge"(pg. 97).

"The following year God's scourge against the Poles, Karl Gustav, king of the Swedes, set out from the north."

This king was one of the most outstanding generals of his time and one of the most ferocious of the Protestant leaders.

I. - THE SIEGE: PHASE BEFORE THE ATTACK

THE EMPLOYMENT OF THE BINOMIAL FEAR - KINDNESS PREDOMINATES

The Swedes easily took the whole country, almost without resistance. Practically all the nobility, part of which was Calvinist, accepted Karl Gustav as "Protector of the Polish Crown," abandoning King Jan Kazimierz to his own fate. After conquering Krakow in the far south, they sent, on orders of the Swedish King, an army of three or four thousand men to take the fortress - sanctuary of Czestochowa, about 125 miles from there.

1. A third force Catholic* employs for the first, into the binomial fear - kindness

Going ahead of the enemy, Count Jan Wejchard of Wrzeszczewicz, in order to gain the good graces of the king of the heretics, demands of the Pauline Friars that they hand over the fortress of Jasna Gora to him, a Catholic, to avoid its falling directly into the hands of the Swedes. He threatened to take the sanctuary by force, if the did not heed his demand. The monks headed by their Friar Augustine Kordecki tried to dissuade the count from his vile pretension and refused his proposal.

2. An authentic Catholic reacts

Meanwhile, some nobles, fleeing before the Swedish advance, sought refuge in Jasna Gora. One of them, Stephan Zamoyski, counseled the religious not to give in to the enemy, and affirmed that those who sought refuge there were prepared to die in defense of the holy place, confiding themselves to the protection of Our Lady.

3. The first refusal of the monks, in the face of the binomial fear - kindness

The Count of Wrzeszczewicz, however, did not give up his plan, and sent an ultimatum to the Prior, demanding openly that Jasna Gora yield to the Swedish King and swear submission and loyalty to the usurper, and that the religious promise to denounce to him any uprisings which they may hear of in the future.

The monks respond immediately, through their prior: "It is better to die worthily, than to live impiously." (pg. 103)

4. The third force Catholic shows himself a traitor

Since the treasonous Count did not have the means to conquer Jasna Gora by arms, he attacked and damaged some properties of the monastery, and hastened to meet General Miller, who was moving his troops not far away. Enticing him with the treasures of the shrine, he managed to convince him to attack Jasna Gora right away.

The prior, calling together the council of the monastery, communicated to the religious his decision not to hand the holy place over to the heretics, and to resist with all disposable resources. His decision was unanimously approved.

5. Defections generalized in Poland - only the monastery resists

Meanwhile, King Jan Kazimierz took refuge in the neighboring principality of Opole, in Silesia, where he would try to reunite the remnants of the army of Poland. But he could not give any assistance to Jasna Gora. Many nobles, on the other hand "satisfied" with the promises of peace and security made by the Swedes, began to return to their properties.

But Stanislaw Warszycki, noble owner of the Castle of Krakow and First Senator of the Crown, sent provisions and 12 cannons at that moment as his contribution to help in the defense of Jasna Gora.

6. Second employment of the binomial fear-kindness

Now came reports that General Miller, with an army of three or four thousand men and nineteen heavy guns, plus some supporting bands from the Count of Wrzeszczewicz, Waklaw Sadowski and the Prince of Saxony, were setting out from Weilun toward Czestochowa, where he should arrive on the eighteenth.

Then there was no lack of "prudent" advice for the Father Prior. So, the Prior of the convent of Wielun, "taking into account the disparity of the military forces," advised Father Kordecki not to resist, thus sparing Jasna Gora from material damage. This had its influence on the defenders of a weaker character.

7. Second refusal of Father Kordecki - the monastery prepares for every eventuality

But Fray Kordecki did not count on material resources alone. He encouraged all to offer their lives in defense of the honor of the holy place, and to place all their hopes in the Blessed Virgin, "who in such an extreme necessity would not fail them with her help." He asked them all to assist at the Mass which he would pray before the altar of the Image of Our Lady of Czestochowa. He ordered that the Blessed Sacrament be carried in procession along the walls and bastions. He blessed the cannons, one by one, the cannon balls, the bullets, and the barrels of powder.

8. "The monastery answers by the mouth of its cannons": the struggle begins

Meanwhile, the Swedes reached the foot of Jasna Gora. It was two o'clock in the afternoon. General Miller sent a written peace proposal with a delegation, proposing the peaceful capitulation of Jasna Gora, to avoid "unnecessary bloodshed"... The declared adversary also pretended to be merciful.

The enemy troops had already taken up positions for the siege of the walls, and were studying the positions of the cannons of the fortress.

"It did not seem fitting to answer that letter in writing," reported Fr. Kordecki. "It was no longer the hour to write, but to take up arms... We answered by the muzzles of our cannons..." (pg. 109).

The answer was so convincing, that, at nightfall, Miller had to beg for a truce, and he took advantage of the occasion to assure the friars that he did not want to do any damage to the sanctuary.

Since the Swedish troops had occupied granaries belonging to the convent and located outside the walls, the defenders bombarded them at night with incendiary projectiles, so that they could not be used to supply the enemy.

The following day, Miller hid his artillery in the nearby village of Czestochowa, whence he bombarded Jasna Gora. When the religious realized this, they considered that the destruction of the village was of no importance in comparison with the defense of the sanctuary of Our Lady, and, directing their artillery in that direction, they set the thatched houses on fire. Many of the Swedes in their surprise ran out into the open where they were brought under the fire of the monastery's defenders.

9. The fourth attempt to apply the binomial - Fray Kordecki rejects it

Then, Miller sent another delegate to convince the Pauline Friars to accept the peace, by showing them that the resistance of Jasna Gora was unreasonable, in view of the fact that the whole country had already surrendered.

10. The fifth attempt to employ the binomial - Fray Kordecki defiant

The commandant of the heretics sent a new message requesting capitulation, for Karl Gustav had ordered him to take the fortress of Czestochowa. It was nighttime, and since the following day was Sunday and a Feast of Our Lady, there were various ceremonies for the occasion, among them a procession with the Blessed Sacrament, inside the walls. In view of this, the Swedes had to wait until midday for their answer, which was moreover negative.

II. - THE BATTLE

Infuriated, the Protestants concentrated a three day attack on Jasna Gora, launching grenades and incendiary projectiles, trying to set fire to the installations of the monastery and the sanctuary. By night they dug trenches leading toward the walls.

1. Amidst the cannons' roar a hymn from the tower.

Infuriated, the Protestants concentrated a three day attack on Jasna Gora

At a certain moment, in the midst of the noise of the bombardment, a pious and sacral hymn was heard, coming from the height of the tower of the sanctuary, and giving new heart of the defenders. From then on, it became customary to hear everyday, in the midst of the fight, the hymns which emanated from the solid and majestic tower. At this, the Swedes became even more infuriated, for they saw it as a manifestation of contempt for them.

Fire fighting equipment was distributed near the bases of the roofs to combat the incendiary bombs launched by the enemy. Some of them ricocheted off the roofs and fell outside the walls. A bomb, launched at the chapel where the miraculous picture of Our Lady of Czestochowa is found, "turned back toward the enemy camp, as if it had been touched by an invisible force, spreading a terrible fire through the air" (pg. 118)

2. A "commando" raid against the Swedes

Sir Piotr Czarniecki, Commandant of Kiev, one of the five nobles who participated in the defense of Jasna Gora, distinguished in previous wars, decided on a bold stroke against the Swedes. Sallying forth at night with a detachment of soldiers he managed to get into the rearguard of the enemy camps without their detecting him. And he did a beautiful job: he killed the commandant of artillery, various officers, many soldiers, and, having seized two cannon, returned inside the walls. Taking advantage of the confusion and panic which, established themselves among the Swedes, many of them having come out into the open, the cannon of Jasna Gora, complemented Czarniecki's blow eliminating some more of the besiegers, Czarniecki lost only one of his men in the expedition

Miller, becoming convinced that it would not be easy for him to take the fortress, sent a message to Wittemberg, commander of the Swedish armies in Krakow asking him to send cannon powerful enough to break down the walls and additional infantry.

3. Sixth attempt at the binomial: hypocrisy of "a third force"

Meanwhile, a Polish noble, respectable for his age and his speech, unsuspected at first sight, was sent to the fortress to try to persuade its defenders to surrender. "I have come to propose capitulation," he said, "for I consider that it is a pretension beyond the bounds of reason for a monastery to wish to resist the Swedish power, when the whole country has buckled under." And then he gave the age old "friendly advice": "the continuation of the resistance can only stir up the violence of vengeance - it is better to make an agreement with the enemy while you are still intact.... Act as the others have done, for your own good...."(pg. 119) "Moreover the aim of a religious order is to abstain from temporal matters. What do you have to do with the turbulences of war, you whose rules call you to solitude and silence. Ponder it well, lest the arms which you brandish instead of your Rosaries, carry you to perdition...." (pg. 120)

4. The fifth column helps the third force

That was the psychological warfare which Miller carried on during the whole time of the siege. He knew that his messages were presented before all the monks and as many of the civilian defenders as had permission to hear them, on this basis he tried to play on internal public opinion against Fray Kordecki. It seems that Father Prior - either did not discover this ploy - because he always read the successive proposals of Miller before everyone of the psychological conditions of those he commanded would not permit him to act any other way. Nevertheless, he always kept control and maintained his intransigence against the enemy-external and internal.

5. "A noble and a religious in every bastion"

The following day, Fray Kordecki was informed that some members of the garrison were plotting to flee from Jasna Gora and hand themselves over to the Swedes. Fray Kordecki acted immediately: he expelled the chiefs of the revolt from the fortress, increased the salaries of the garrison (the 160 soldiers were paid), and obliged all members of the defending force to swear an oath that they would fight until the last drop of their blood. And he humbly confessed that he, "warned by this event, realized that he had to exert a greater and more exact vigilance" over the troops as well as over the nobles and religious. He assigned the older friars to the choir, particularly the night office, "for during the day even the youngest were usually there." He made a redistribution of the defense, designating a noble and a religious for every bastion; he confided the general command to Sir Stephan Zmoyski and Fr. Ludwick Czarniecki.

6. Two religious to investigate the enemy camp

In order to gain time by delaying the enemy assault, to study his forces, and obtain any news about possible reinforcements which might have been dispatched to Jasna Gora, two religious were sent to the Swedish camp, under the pretext of studying the proposals of General Miller (The Father Prior continuously tried to entertain the enemy commander with this exchanging of messages, to gain time until the winter became more intense, or reinforcements eventually arrived).

In hopes of obtaining their rendition, Miller received the two delegates with open arms, gave them six great fish as a sign of his "generosity," and sent them back with his conditions for a treaty: "the monks must recognize the Swedish King and abjure King Jan Kazimierz."

Fray Kordecki sent him the following answer, with the two monks: "By no means can we deny the rights and protection of King Jan Kazimierz as long as another King, has not been selected according to the laws and consecrated by the most Reverend Primate of the Crown as the customs of our ancestors prescribe.... If some have abandoned our legitimate King, by no means may this proposal to us be an example, to us who are ready to seal with our blood our fidelity to our Lord. Thus to the limit of our forces, we shall defend all the rights of God and of men!"

7. "Even though they kill the hostages, we shall not yield..."

Angered, the heretic commander imprisoned the two religious, sending word that he would only free them if their superiors gave them authority to discuss the terms of surrender with him. And, in the face of Father Kordecki's silence, the general affirmed that he would have the two hostages executed if the defenders of the monastery fire on his soldiers, who then began to move their cannons to positions nearer the walls, always repeating at the top of their voices, the "slogan" of their commandant: shoot and we will liquidate your monks....

At the same time, the heretics spread the news of the fall of the last pockets of resistance in the country, to take away from the beleaguered garrison any hope of receiving external assistance. By all means the tried to break their spirit.

The Father Prior did everything possible to rescue the two monks held by Miller, accusing him of violating the law of nations, the right of immunity of delegates, of showing himself a man without honor, and saying that no agreement would be possible with one who did not respect individual liberty. Finally he warned him that if the heretics in their impiety decided to kill the two hostages, "they (the defending garrison) could not oppose themselves to the will of God, without whose assent not one hair falls from our heads...Let them die then, that by their blood, they may obtain on honorable liberty; while as for us, we swear that we shall dedicate ourselves courageously and confiding in the help of God Almighty, to the defense of the sanctuary"(pg. 129).

Miller decided then to change his tactics: he freed one of the hostages but under the condition that, after visiting the monastery, he return to his clutches, threatening to deal a "terrible death" to the other prisoner, if the condition were not fulfilled.

8. Heroism in obedience

On reaching the convent, as Miller hoped, the religious told what he saw and heard in the enemy camp, and concluded by saying that he considered it madness to continue resisting in the face of such a powerful enemy; nevertheless, he said further - what Miller did not expect - considering the value of his life less than that of the good of the Congregation, he was disposed to review his conclusions if his superiors considered otherwise. And he returned to the Swedish camp with the following proposal: contrary to all the laws of the nations, the two representatives of Jasna Gora had been enslaved: as slaves, they were deprived of their own will so it did not make sense to confer on them authority to discuss anything. As far as they, the hostages, were concerned, they were disposed to sacrifice their lives for the glory of God.

So, Miller sent the second hostage, committing him first by the same oath to return into his hands.

Entering the walls of the fortress, the religious exposed the situation to his confreres, delivering his life into the hands of his superiors and disposing himself to die to keep the Holy Place from being stained by the heretics. When he returned to the camp with the same answer as the first one, both heard the condemnation to the pain of death, to be executed the next day; they were advised moreover by General Miller, to prepare themselves to die by hanging. Hearing the sentence they exclaimed to the shock of the Swedes: "Ah, why may we not die today, if we must be immolated tomorrow for God, for the King and for our Fatherland?"(pg. 130) On the following day however the execution of the penalty was postponed to an indeterminate date.

9. Seeing the armistice violated the monastery opens fire

While this was going on, an armistice was in force. But the Swedes began to take positions nearer to the walls. In the face of this, the beleaguered force broke the ceasefire, imposing heavy casualties on the enemy.

10. Friar Kordecki resists rank and file pressures favorable to the third force

And General Miller sent yet another messenger demanding the rendition of Jasna Gora. Fray Kordecki answered him that, first of all he demanded respect to the pledged word, for what guarantee could he have that the Swedes would fulfill the agreements they made, if they kept the delegates sent by the monastery as hostages? Disappointed in his hopes to take Jasna Gora by peaceful means, Miller finally ordered the freeing of the hostages.

11. The seventh pressure of the binomial fear-kindness: Friar Kordecki resists

In the days which followed, the general insistently sent delegations to the besieged fortress, trying to convince its defenders to open the gates to a Swedish garrison, and to discuss the terms of a treaty. But, to the despair of the heretics, the Father Prior, "in order to have a guarantee that the agreements would be respected," now demanded that they be discussed directly with Karl Gustavo, who was far from Czestochowa.

Meanwhile, a Polish noble, approached the walls, and addressed the faithful nobles: "...for us (traitors) the salvation of our Fatherland is also very dear, we are just as interested as the other nobles are, in the preservation of the country's integrity. Since, it is more and more menaced with ruin, it is necessary to dedicate ourselves to it (our fatherland) with sincerity. So we have decided, prudently, to help it (our country) by going over to H.M. the Swedish King, our most benign lord and defender"; cease, then, this resistance...(pg. 133).

Wittemberg himself, commandant of the troops in Krakow sent a letter to the beleaguered troops, indicating all the "benefits" which the monks would gain if they entered into a treaty with General Miller, and threatened them with cruel reprisals if they continued their resistance.

12. The Protestants employ their arms once again.

Enraged by the intransigence of the defense, the Swedes, losing all hope of any agreement, unleashed heavy attacks against Jasna Gora; but the cannons of the fortress did not permit them to get close to its walls.

13. The Protestants exercise the pressure of fear and kindness for the eighth time.

The seventh of December, Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a Polish noble, Piotr Sladowski, who had been arrested by the Swedes when he was returning from Prussia to this village, was sent to the fortress charged with pressing the monks to capitulate. But on the contrary, he encouraged them not to give up, saying that the invading armies had begun to suffer their first defeats, and that the continuous acts of violence of the heretic sacking of the properties of the nobles, murders of priests, profanations of churches, violations of women - were stirring up great reaction in the country. All of these violence's were taking place, he added, with God's permission and as a chastisement for those who were lacking in fidelity to Jan Kazimierz.

14. Two valuable hawkish reports

The following day, the Feast of Our Lady, one of the villagers of Czestochowa, disguised as a Swedish soldier; managed to reach the walls, and informed its defenders that the besieging army was about to receive six heavy cannons from Krakow to demolish the walls, plus reinforcements of 200 infantrymen; on the other hand, many Tartar troops were going to join Jan Kazimierz. He also threw in a letter signed by Fr. Antoni Paskowski, Prior of the Paulist Convent in Krakow, which described the atrocities committed by the heretics and recommended to the defenders of Jasna Gora that they not let themselves be deceived by the kind of words of the enemy for "among the Swedes nothing is sacred, neither faith, nor religion, divine or human; they are not accustomed to fulfill any agreement or political oath" (pg. 137).

A little later, a Tartar, who was permitted to come within the walls, after contemplating the sanctuary, surprised the monks with words of encouragement, urging them not to permit that "swine and perjurers occupy the place consecrated to the Most Pure Virgin."

With all of these facts, noted Fr. Kordecki, the people under his command recovered their confidence and spirits, although they knew that Miller would soon receive six heavy cannons to batter down the walls.

15. The Catholics witness a clear intervention of Providence

While the ceremonies of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception were being carried out, a Swedish soldier who was returning from the village of Redzin, where he had blasphemed against the honor of Our Lady, fell struck by a ball coming from Jasna Gora, which was not aimed at him, but which ricocheted off the snow and hit him. Fr. Kordecki noted the fact, commenting that thus, "he who insulted the sempiternal brilliance and glory of the Most Holy Mother of God, received at God's hands a just chastisement, as unworthy to see the sun"(pg. 137).

16. More armed combat than ever

On Saturday, the heretics began once again to bombard the monastery, and on Sunday the bombardment took on such a fury, that it appeared that "hell itself was vomiting against the sacred icon." The monks, however, carried out that morning - as was their custom - a ceremony in honor of the Blessed Sacrament. After the Holy Mass, the Most Holy was carried in a procession along the walls; Fr. Kordecki said that the balls passed closed to the heads of the defenders, but that only after the termination of the ceremonies did they respond to the enemy fire. During that day, 330 projectiles fell upon the fortress, and three of its soldiers gave their souls to God.

About midday, the enemy ceased fire and sent a message asking if the monks had been convinced yet to accept the protection of the Swedish king. But the Prior was not in a hurry: he told them that he would send his answer the next day. Immediately, the Swedes renewed the heavy bombardment. The following day, the scene was repeated, and the monks responded once again: "such important matters must be pondered at length..." (pg. 140).

17. The Catholics witness another intervention of Providence

At that stage, the winter was becoming more intense, so the Swedish soldiers were led to light bonfires at night to protect themselves from the cold, however, in this way they revealed their positions, coming under the direct fire of the defenders of Jasna Gora. And they quickly convinced themselves that, between cold and death, it was better to take the cold.

By this time already, the garrison was preparing itself for the assault which the enemy would launch, sooner or later, against the walls. They prepared the clubs with nails sticking out of them, iron bars, beams and rocks to repel those who might reach the walls.

When the Swedes launched themselves for the first assault, they were easily repelled, because their movements showed up against the snow and made them an easy mark for the defending troops.

In the days that followed, a dense fog covered Monte Claro, making it possible for the Swedes to move their great assault machinery closer, unperceived, while the great cloud was not cleared away by the supplications and prayers of the besieged. In view of this, the Prior selected one of the religious to "cry out for help of the powers of God against the spells of the enemy, to clear the darkened air with exorcisms, and bless the arms of the garrison," this turned out to be so efficient that, it neutralized the efforts of the witches, clearing the darkness from the air, and once again their shots were sure, and the enemy fell, in spite of being protected by the abject help of the demon" (pg. 143).

18. New third force defections within the monastery

While the heretics continued pounding Jasna Gora, two Polish nobles had taken refuge there. Fearing that the fortress would be taken, one of them took two religious and the other his wife and small son. They had even obtained permission of Miller to pass through the line of fire, but Father Kordecki categorically prevented them from carrying out their intentions, so that such an act might not affect the morale of the defense.

But this event, added to the insistence of the enemy attacks plus the death of a youthful member of the garrison, did not delay in influencing the spirit of some of the monks. They, in a state of continuous fear, began to urge surrender, arguing that, if Providence, in whose hands is the power to lose thrones or to put them in other hands, had delivered the Polish Crown to the Swedes, it did not behoove them as monks, to oppose themselves to the will of God, but to accept it, all the more so since the enemy assured them the defense of the Faith and freedom of worship...

When such insinuations became more frequent in the meetings of the Congregation, the Prior called them to order, fraternally enough but not without energy: "...what Faith is ours, he bellowed, what love, what gratitude to God so generous to us - that such small damage to our earthly comforts is able to turn us away from the guard and protection of the chest containing the celestial treasures of the eternal King? Let us consider that it is by far more prudent for us to defend the integrity of the House of God, the Holy Faith and at the same time our own liberties, than for us to lose all and, in addition to that, to go into exile and eternal slavery." (Pg. 146).

19. Another "hawkish" report

A letter, signed by a noble, found in the moat around the walls, which Fray Kordecki considered a grace destined to revive the hopes of those who were intimidated, reported the movement of the Tartars to the aid of Jan Kazmierz. This news really encouraged the defenders again.

20. The Protestant aggression grows more intense

After trying an assault on the north side, the heretics then tried to demolish the walls on the south side, by means of an intense bombardment. They also fired against the sanctuary itself, trying to weaken its walls.

21. The third force in the monastery applies the ninth fear-kindness pressure

Now it is some of the nobles who have take refuge there, who go suggesting to the Prior that he reach an agreement with the enemy. The enemy, they say, who has dominated the whole country, will not be intimidated by the resistance of his last focus. We have no prospects of receiving reinforcements. So, why not accept an accord with the Swedes, which they themselves are offering us, while our situation is still good? (Fray Kordecki does not mention names, but it appears clear that those "doves" were from among the number of those ignominious nobles, who sought refuge in Jasna Gora, but refused to take up arms, in order not to "compromise" themselves... There is a note about them at the end of this work).

Fray Kordecki answers them: "...but the enemy will not concede all that we demand; we desire (above all), that the place consecrated to the Virgin Most Pure never be stained by the impious feet of the heretics. You, dear sirs, overcome by adversities, desire to reach an accord so that, relieving yourselves of the unhappiness of the siege and the discomforts of the war, you will then be able to enjoy an agreeable peace without any worries. Do you think that, if we surrender, you will be free from all the adversities of war once you have left the cloister?... The capitulation will become for you, then, a spring of misfortunes and defeats; but if, on the contrary, bearing the slight inconveniences, we overcome the obstinacy of our enemies with the help of God, then we should surely win a certain stable peace." Peace through intransigence (pg. 148).

22. Pressure from the Protestants for the tenth time

One day, Miller's soldiers discovered a number of silver objects belonging to the sanctuary, which had been hidden in the bottom of a tank, on hearing the news of the advance of the Swedish troops toward Czestochowa. The chief of the heretics as a proof of his "respect" for the holy place, offered the silver which had been found, promising to add moreover some of his personal jewels, if the monks agreed to place Jasna Gora under the "protection" of Karl Gustav. The Prior responded immediately: "As to the return of the silver objects, we accept the gracious offer of the General, but not accepting the condition which was proposed to us: because the glory of God and the protection of the sacred things is more important for us than all the treasures in the world" (pg. 150).

23. A notable victory of the Catholics

The 20th of December, Sir Stefan Zamoyski, in broad daylight, at one o'clock in the afternoon, sallied forth on horseback with a group of soldiers, and moving through the moat, and then through trenches which the enemy was digging toward the walls, took some advance detachments of the besieging forces by surprise, killing several soldiers and destroying two of their cannons. They retired under cover of fire from the walls. In this incursion, Zamoyski lost only one man. The Swedes suspended their attack for two days, in order to take care of their dead and wounded.

Perhaps fear also led Miller to cease his fire, comments Fray Kordecki for the news went about that, when the general was offering a banquet for his officers, a cannon ball fired at his tent, went through the wall and destroyed the table, causing all the guests to leave hurriedly, without even making their farewells.

24. Within the monastery the supreme pressure of fear-kindness

On the third day, the defenders of Jasna Gora identified on the horizon the wagons loaded with gunpowder, and the heavy guns coming from Krakow, to reinforce the besieging army. Then, fear once again came to dominate the besieged. And many of the nobles tried to convince the monks to surrender. The religious debating about the new situation, reached contradictory decisions. "The power of the enemy, the lack of reinforcements, the atrocious fury of the heretics, the loss of their possessions, the injury of the Holy Place," all this occurred to the mind of the monks. In the hour of pressure, sophisms: "Those who were attached to their lives and were eager for peace, wanted an accord with the enemy. They were saying: "It is right for a religious, who has renounced the world and consecrated himself to the spiritual service of Christ, to take up the sword and shed blood; he should rather forget such things and dedicate himself to his own salvation and if we are going to have to surrender to our enemy for lack of food, isn't it better to do it now, so we will avoid increasing his anger by our delay?" (pg. 155).

The older monks, however, were of exactly the opposite opinion, and they managed to make their counsels prevail. After expounding some of the reasons why the resistance ought to continue, they urged them all to wait for the coming of reinforcements and confide in the mercy of God, "because if we once give up to the enemy, then there will be no more possibility of correcting our error." (Pg. 155).

"Without doubt, if the Supreme Judge disposes that our Fatherland recover its ancient grandeur (and this we cannot even doubt), all the force of its libertarian must come from Jasna Gora," for, since Our Lady has been pleased to be called Queen of Poland, She has made Jasna Gora the capital of Her Kingdom. Whence it follows that Jasna Gora is "the fountain of the graces which God will pour out over souls, curing them of their internal weaknesses, whence also will flow the strength and health of the whole body of our Fatherland. That most glorious Lady will extend her hand once again - (which she withdrew, on account of the inscrutable designs of God) to the defense of our unfortunate Fatherland, and lift it up from its defeat; so that we may understand that the Kingdom of Poland will recover its ancient grandeur only by generosity, the power and the protection of its queen." (Pg. 156)

With the new heavy guns and the assault carts which he had received from Wittemberg, Gen. Miller prepared himself for a second assault, and, as usual, he sent a message to the monks proposing peace, and threatening to discharge all his hatred over the Holy Place, if his proposal were refused.

As was his custom, also, Fray Kordecki answered amiably asking for time "to consult his superiors": only then..."shall we do what seems suitable." He also asked a truce for the following day, since it would be the day of the Holy Nativity.

At the same time, the Prior wrote to the Count of Wrezczewicz, appealing to him to intercede with the general, to obtain a truce of Christmas. His purpose in this was to mystify the Swedes about the state of spirit of the besieged garrison, and to gain time, which would be particularly precious now, in view of the news that the King had begun to move with his troops.

But Miller responded immediately through the treasonous Count; he would concede a truce only if he received, that same night, an answer from Kordecki agreeing to surrender.

This time the Prior of the Paulines decided not to answer: and the religious spent all night Christmas Eve awake: some watching on the walls, others encouraging the garrison; but the majority stayed in the church praying.

25. The Protestants launch yet yet another attack

A more intense movement in the enemy camp, more numerous campfires presaged something menacing for that night. God, however, did not permit the heretics to pour out their fury over Jasna Gora, until the following day, after the end of the Catholic ceremonies in the sanctuary.

At midday the 25th, the massive attack commenced. "The cannons to the north thundered, and the balls struck with such force on the walls of the cloister, that, in many places they went right through them, flying and bouncing around amid the debris and dust that they scattered in the corridors and stairways, and causing such fear among its residents that no one had the courage to look out the window. Now the enemy hurled torches wrapped in hemp, soaked in pitch, and studded with brimstone and sulfur. They scattered a terrifying fire, principally those that came in iron tubes, so that they vomited fire and lead on all sides. They were similar to grenades, but since the majority of them fell outside of the Cloister, or in its interior patio, they did not do any damage" (pg. 162-163). The most dangerous projectiles after all, were the iron ones with lead in their bellies which on exploding, scattered pieces of iron in all directions.

"At nightfall, finally, one of the heavy guns which was doing the most damage, burst, putting an end to the attack. It was said all over, and heard from the Swedes themselves, in the camp, during the siege, as well as amidst other circumstances, that the cannon balls fired against the cloister frequently bounced off the walls and, returned to the Swedish camp with great force. When many doubted this, the respectable Piotr Okrasa, who Christmas day was delivering provisions in the camp of the besieging troops, affirmed categorically that is what occurred with the last shot of that canon and that in the midst of an unusual fear, they were saying in the camp that by the force of the projectile, which had bounced back from the wall, the cannon was destroyed and its gunner killed. He (Piotr Okrasa) said that this seemed to him to be true, for the projectile which was then carried about through the camp, had the characteristics of a true Swedish cannon ball - it was larger than any of those in Jasna Gora. There is not the slightest doubt that, from the moment in which that cannon was blown up,The roar of the cannons was no longer heard-neither on that day, nor on those that followed-thus it seemed that a great and miraculous power, contrary to the enemy, put an end to the siege of Jasna Gora, for the Swedes had all the ammunition they wanted (pg. 164).

26. The eleventh and supreme pressure of fear and kindness

At dusk General Miller once again wrote to the Pauline monks. It would be his last proposal, his last threat. After regretting the intransigence of the defenders of Jasna Gora, he offered them two alternatives: either they would hand the fort over to the Swedish troops on that very day, or, swearing on oath of fidelity to Karl Gustav, they would pay an indemnity of 60 thousand talars to the besieging troops, after which the siege would be lifted. If the offer was refused, however, he threatened "to reduce to ruins and ashes all the villages and hamlets located within a radius of three miles, and to hand over all the properties of all the nobles who were resisting in Jasna Gora to be sacked, burned and totally destroyed..." (pg. 165).

On the following day, the 26th of December, the Father Prior responded to the Swedish General; It is a shame, but now we have no means to pay the ransom you ask!But you, sir general, know that we are not rebels, for we are not against the monarchy...

At the same time, he wrote to the Count of Wrzeszczewicz, but in other terms: On account of former benefits which Your Excellency has conceded to this sanctuary, your life has been spared various times during this siege; but lower thy head, "do not abuse the patience of God!"

27. The supreme refusal of Fray Kordecki: the definitive victory of the convent

On that day, according to the custom, the defenders continued the commemorations of the Nativity, with chants and ceremonies. But the Swedish troops thought that it was the celebration of some victory, and began to abandon their positions in their consternation. The officers recognizing what was really going on, concluded in their turn, that the besieged forces must be very well provisioned, in victuals and in munitions, to permit themselves such festivities. In fact, the provisions were already at their end...38 days of siege had gone by.

"In the obscurity of the night, the heavy guns were retired from their positions; in the early morning the commanders of that so numerous army withdrew, each on his own way. Miller went to Piotrkoy, the Count of Wrzeszczewicz to Welum, Sadowski to Sieradz, the Saxon Prince to Krakow" (pg. 168).

III. INTERVENTIONS OF OUR LADY WHICH THE PROTESTANTS SAW AND THE CATHOLICS DID NOT SEE: OUR LADY, THE GREAT VICTOR

"How could it have happened that only 70 religious (absolutely non-combatants) should have felt such force in themselves, that with five nobles and their few servants, plus 160 infantry men, the greater part of them villagers, that they dared to resist such a numerous army, if God Himself, protecting that place consecrated to the glory of his dear Mother, had not inspired this determination in the religious and had not inculcated courage in the midst of the general fear? Because, although sometimes they lost hope, whenever, after the recitation of prayers, they assembled in the refectory and each one was consulted, all voted unanimously that they would prefer rather to fall suffering the most terrible of deaths, than to permit that the infamous Swede stain with his feet the place consecrated to the Most Pure Virgin" (pg. 170).

1. So that no man may boast...

"God Himself disposed things in such a way, that among the mountains celebrated for their miracles, might also be numbered this Mount Clear of Poland, defended by a special mercy of God, obtained by the Most Holy Virgin; so that no man may brag of having saved it, or at least repeat proud and boastful phrases: it was our hands that did this..."

2. "A Lady of a menacing countenance..."

"According to the testimony of our enemies themselves, it is manifest that Jasna Gora was defended miraculously and successfully, because Lord Grodzicki, Commandant of artillery of H.M., and others, revealed that Miller said in the encampment that the only motive which lead him to raise the siege of Jasna Gora was the word and the menacing face of a noble lady, who appeared before him, leaving him perturbed. Whence the report was spread about among the Swedes that Miller lifted the siege because he was deceived by a maiden at the service of the monks. What was said among the people, however, was that the general was severely warned by a lady who appeared to him, to raise the siege, under pain of the complete loss of his army" (pg. 172).

The letters of the Dominican nuns of Piotrkow to the sisters who were then in Jasna Gora are in accord with this description, they contain, among others, the following facts: "Miller observed with great attention, here in the church, the picture of Our Lady of Czestochowa, and since his interpreter asked us to give him a small copy of the image, we gave it to him, and Miller took it from his hands. Thus it became clear to us that Miller wanted to find out if the vision he had at night was similar to the picture."

The same religious of Piotrkow later told the Most Rev. Provincial (under whose jurisdiction is also the convent of Czestochowa), that Miller, after he took the picture from the hands of the interpreter, said the following: "It is absolutely not comparable to that virgin who appeared to me; for it is not possible to see anything comparable on earth. Something of the celestial and divine, which frightened me from the beginning, shone in her face."

I return to the letter: "The Swedes themselves affirmed, that some of them saw a Lady on the walls, pointing the cannons and furnishing with her own hands, the necessary arms to the defenders who were in the trenches; and to whose who were tunneling in the rock (the mount is based on a rock, and the Swedes were excavating tunnels toward the walls) toward the walls there appeared a venerable old man, who counseled them to give up their useless labor, for not even in seven years would they manage to carry it out. Crushed then by these apparitions, they gave up the siege." This was also heard from the Swedes by Sir Aleksy Sztrzalkowski, who told it to the monks, on his word of honor."

"Lady Jadwiga Jaroszewsha also told that she saw the figure of a venerable old man, who encouraged her with the hope that God would in brief manifest His mercy, and the enemy would raise the siege of Jasna Gora. In that vision, a friar (who called her by the name), in a white habit, celebrated Mass at an altar located in a corner to the right, on the east side of the Church. We could not consider the old man as any other than St. Paul (the first hermit and our Patriarch), to whose honor this altar is consecrated. Sirs Jan Wiechowski and Maciej Wegierski of the Polish nobility, testified that they had heard the Swedes telling how they had seen an old man beside a Lady, who appeared on the walls and beat back the Swedish projectiles."

3. "She obliged us to cover our eyes and bow our heads

"So also, Father Blazej Wadowski, Prior of Weiruszov of our Order, stated under oath that in the house of a citizen of Wieruszow invited by the Swedish commanders, Jorge Eichner and Arens Lukman to eat with them they heard such blasphemies from the mouths of the profaners as: "What witch is this that is to be found in your cloister of Czestohowa, who covered with a blue mantle sallies from the cloister and walks along the walls, resting from time to time on the bastions - and whose sight makes our people drop with terror, so much so that, when she appears, we have to turn our faces to the ground and protect our eyes?"

"Other military chiefs who were then seated at the table confirmed this. Some of them added moreover, as if they were vomiting it: "Your monks are perfect sorcerers. Look how they bewitched one of our companions so that, from the moment in which he fired against the church, he has his arm stuck straight out, and it is impossible to lower it or bend it in any direction; what is more, his whole body is as it were paralyzed, making it impossible for him to sit or dismount from a horse, so we had to send him to Leszno with his arm extended, in the position in which he was when he pointed the carbine, because he was a useless burden to us."

"The Prior cited above added that, formerly, the Swedes, arrogantly spread blasphemies against the Most Holy Virgin, now, after the withdrawal from Czestochowa, they have become more bland and not one did not hear anything like that from their lips" (pg. 173-174).

4. "…and pointed a sword at the Swedish Camps"

"Sir Mikloj Bielawski, of Ruska, described the commentaries of the Swedes, with his own pen, for our perpetual remembrance, as follows:

"The soldiers of the division of Sadowski (a turncoat noble), who as a colonel of the Swedish army, returning from Jasna Gora, passed through my village, which is called Golina. When I asked, once, those who were quartered in my house, what had happened at Czestochowa, and if they had been successful in the siege of Monte Claro, with such a numerous army, they answered: -- that frequently there had appeared to them a person in a white mantle, who, coming out from the cloister, would point at the Swedish camp with a sword (here a line of the book is missing)… immediately would fall. We learned also from the very sentinels that forty soldiers, terrified by this awful vision, had lost their lives."

"When this same noble was visited a second time by the soldiers, out of chivalry, they told him "that they themselves had seen a Lady vested in a white mantle; when two Silesian brothers by the name of Dudzicz, pointed their carbines at Her, part of the breech of the carbine of one of them was driven so far into his face, that it was impossible for us to remove it, the surgeon had to cover it; the other had his body paralyzed as if he were petrified; the Swedish army took him with them. "This account, they made under oath, and the aforementioned noble signed it and sent it to Jasna Gora."

"Sir Strzalkawaki, already mentioned before, an eminent and cultured man, a citizen of Greater Poland, testified that he also heard from many Swedes, that the Lady seen on the walls of the cloister terrified them by her bearing, as well as by the dense fog which enveloped the cloister, just when they were making the greatest efforts to take it. We have also been informed of this same fact by outstanding men and trustworthy citizens of Czestochowa, who heard such reports from Polish soldiers in the service of the Swedes" (pg. 175).

"Many trustworthy nobles testified how they found the following fact among the commentaries of the besieging Swedes particularly noteworthy: "frequently (said the Swedes), when we were preparing for the assault of the cloister with siege guns, there would appear a fog, enveloped in this fog the mountain cast false shadows which tricked our vision - it would appear that the mountain with the cloister was raised high in the air, and when we aimed our cannon fire up there, the projectiles passed over the cloister without doing it any damage. Sometimes also in the midst of that dark fog, which confused our vision, we would see the cloister on top of a low hill; when our gunners, deceived by the shadows took the cloister as their target, as it appeared, the projectiles would fall close to the walls of the fortress and ricocheting on the frozen ground return at great velocity" (to the Swedish camp).

"I decided to add to the account of the siege of Jasna Gora some of these examples of miraculous facts, to show clearly that the hill of the Most Holy Virgin was defended and saved by the hand of God Himself," writes Fray Kordecki (pg. 176.)

IV. THE PROPAGANDA OF THE SWEDES

The Swedes had a booklet published in Amsterdam which contained a fanciful description of the "conquest" of Jasna Gora and which they spread all over Europe prior to their withdrawal from Czestochowa. This description showed in detail what they would like to have done if they had in fact taken the shrine. Kordecki includes it in his Memoirs "For the shame of that subversive and impious people." King John Casmir, who had received it from Paris, gave him a copy of the booklet. Under the title "Victory of the Swedish King, in which twenty thousand Poles fell and Czestochowa was destroyed," the document reports falsely that Jasna Gora was taken and that Swedish soldiers "spared neither man nor women and killed the monks and priests... and that the victors carried off as spoils even the silver picture frames form the church." (Pg. 181).

V. THE JUST END OF A CENTRIST

The traitorous Count of Wrzeszczewicz, after having been defeated in battle in Lesser Poland, was later discovered by peasants and beaten to death with rods (pg. 186).

VI. THE INTRANSIGENCE OF JASNA GORA SPARKS REACTIONS ALL OVER

Published with the "Memoirs" is the text of the document with twelve "demands" which the nobility presented to the invaders, right after they had entered the country, as a condition for their recognizing the Swedish King. The "demands" boil down to the following: Do not touch our possessions and leave us freedom of worship… Fray Kordecki merely reproduces the text of the document, without making any commentary.

For such a document to be valid, however, explained the Prior of Jasna Gora, it would have to be ratified by the Senate. There the chief influence belonged to the ecclesiastical senators, who chose exile rather than approve such an agreement.

The Archbishop of Gniezno, Primate of the Polish Crown and first Duke, sent out a call to all the provinces immediately after the fall of Krakow on the 17th of November, 1655, summoning all the nobles to unite around the legitimate king in order to fight against the invaders. His terms however, have neither energy nor Catholicity: "I hope that all will return to fight for our King and our Fatherland…"

On January 3,1656. The Primate announced to the nation an unexpected event: the Khan of the Tartars, entering the Polish territories, communicated to King John Casmir that he wanted to unite his armies with those of the Poles to combat the enemies of His majesty. "This is especially a work to the mercy and Power of God," continued the Primate, inasmuch as, while some Christians rejoice at our ruin and other refuse us any help or protection, He aids us by means of those who are outside the Church of Christ... Thus, offering His all-powerful right hand to those who had grown weak, He does not permit the Kingdom to disappear. (pg 204).

Despite the Primate's summons and this encouraging support, the nobles did not respond until after the news of the victorious defense of Jasna Gora had spread all over Poland and had commenced to stir up a great reaction among the humble folk. Only then, on the 29th of December 1656, they formed the Confederation of the Nobility in Arms. The oaths they took, were like the following: I swear to do my duty "before God, my conscience and public law…"

VII. THE GLORIFICATION OF OUR LADY OF CZESTOCHOWA

Once the faithful forces had been gathered together, and so that the counter-offensive would have the greatest success, the King made his way to the Cathedral of Lwow in the company of the nobility and the people, and there, with the approbation of the Senate, solemnly proclaimed Our Lady of Czestochowa Queen and Mother of Poland, that is of the Poles, Lithuanians, and White Russians, the peoples who then formed part of the Polish-Lithuanian Crown. The act was carried out before the altar of the Most Holy Virgin in the following terms:

"Great Mother of God and Most Holy Virgin! I, John Casmir II, by the grace of Thy Son, the King of Kings, and by Thy Grace, I, the King, casting myself on my knees at Thy Most Holy feet, take Thee today as my Patroness and Queen of my dominions, and I recommend to Thy special protection and defense, myself and my Polish Kingdom, The Nation of Lithuania, and the Principalities of Ruthenia, Prussia, Mazuria, Zmudzia, Inflanta, and Czernichow, as well as the armies of both nations and all my people.

" I cry humbly, from this pitiful and devastated state of my Kingdom, for Thy mercy and assistance against the enemies of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, and, grateful for the immense benefits conferred by Thee, I sense with the nation, a commanding desire to serve Thee zealously, and, in my name and in that of the administrators and of the people, I promise to Thee and to Thy Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord, I will spread Thy glory though all the countries of our Kingdom. Finally, I promise and vow to obtain from the Holy See, since it is only through thy powerful intercession and through the mercy of Thy Son that I shall obtain victory over our enemies, and particularly over the Swedes, that this day be celebrated annually and forever and consecrated to Thee and Thy Son in acknowledgment of these graces, and I will dedicate myself with the Bishops of the Crown so that my promised be kept by my peoples.

"As I see, to the great sorrow of my soul, that all the adversities which have fallen upon my Kingdom in the last seven years, the epidemics, the wars, and other misfortunes, were sent by the Supreme Judge as a punishment for the groans and for the oppression of the peasant. I promise and vow, after the conquest of peace, in union with all the states, to use all means to free my people from all unjust burdens and oppressions. Grant, Oh most loving Queen and Lady, that I obtain the grace of Thy Son to do all that I propose, to which Thou Thyself has inspired me!"

The people wept with emotion on hearing the words of the King, realizing that, from then on, the Blessed Virgin would be recognized as Queen of Poland.

VIII. POLAND SAVED AT CZESTOCHOWA

Immediately after their defeat in Jasna Gora, the Swedes began to lose their fervor, and defeated in battle after battle, they had to fall back into Prussia and lost the greater part of their units.

IX. OUR LADY OF CZESTOCHOWA GLORIFIED IN THE EPIC OF JASNA GORA

"On Easter Sunday, a few days after the King's arrival a Jasna Gora, a triple sun appeared to the south and at the same time there was seen a double solar crown, one of which moved through the air and enveloped the hill and the cloister, the other turned upward with its high point toward the sun, touched the solar disc itself.

"It was beautiful to contemplate these celestial phenomena, for we considered them as symbolizing a victory and as a visible manifestation of the appeasement of the divine anger. Just as the tragic signs in the setting sun of three years before foretold the cruelty of was and immense bloodshed, so the clear brilliance of the sun now returning and the extraordinary crowns, seemed to all to announce the palm of victory and peace." (Pg. 212-213)

"Poland, if thou fightest for Mary, thou shalt be terrible to the followers of hell."

"Contemplate, Poland of posterity, what a great benefit was conferred upon Thee by the Mother of God, whose devotion thy Apostle and martyr Saint Albert, Archbishop of Gniezno, so zealously propagated together with the Roman Catholic Faith! Follow then the holy example of they forefathers, for, if you guard your devotion to Mary, propagate it zealously, and defend it generously, you will attract even greater mercies and become terrible to the followers of hell! Let Christendom look and admire how courageously our Queen of Heaven and earth protects Her kingdom, and how efficaciously She sends aid to Her subjects, deprived of all human help! May the angel of the armies of the Lord, guardian of Poland, deign to move the heavenly militias to pay homage together with us to the supreme majesty of God for such great benefits and may He, with His powerful hand, disperse all the enemies who ally themselves to eradicate from Poland devotion to the Queen of Angels!" (pg. 213)

* The expression third force is employed here to refer to those who are neither with the Catholics against the enemies of the Catholic cause, nor openly against them.

1 The Primate was in Poland the 1st Duke; when the throne was vacant, he would assume the Regency.

May, The Month of Mary

Hail, holy Mother, thou

who didst bring forth the
King who rules heaven
and earth forever and ever.

Czarna Madonna