China Africa, nasty Westerners, and Reparation: an answer to a Leftist

Someone of the Left wrote recently about some comments of mine a relatively standard Leftist response. I took some time to reply. Here it is, first, the Leftist. For the most part, I left the spelling as it was written.

{T]he biggest issues are missing  from [An Préachán]s analysis. they are: slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism. trillions spent on arms race, and now trum [Trump] wants to colonize the space. terrorism has cost europe 200 billion euros in ten years, fine. how much is the worth of all the human and material resources stolen from Africa? a thousand times as much? ten thousand times as much? and now these poor africans are trying to cross the med. just for the opportunity to make a small living for themselves and their families that they left behind. the truth is the only way to save white man's honor a small bit is a massive marshall plan type of program in africa to stop the desperate migration. the ultimate truth is that we have created a barbarian civilisation based on money and power run  by ignorant and selfish people like trump. it cannot last, it is sooner or later doomed. this utter nationalism and global capitalism is a disaster: the inequality is unbearable, the rich are getting richer, some are getting crumbs, and the poor are getting poorer.

[name]

My rejoinder: 

In response, I'd express a couple of basic ideas. First, in general, one has to deal with the world as it is, not as one wishes it to be. Second, an individual may well feel responsible for their ancestors' wretched behavior, and try to do something about it, sure, but depriving your own children in order to repay strangers for some ancestral sin won't sit well with your children.

This is just human nature.

Then, as for past colonialism justifying current invasions, consider:

http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/30/china-targets-africa-with-debt-trap-diplomacy-and-military-expansion/

According to a recent report, Chinese investment in Africa could create national economies entirely dependent on China.

Although infrastructure projects can create jobs, provide an opportunity for skills development and the transfer of new technologies, Chinese loans  amounting to more than $86 billion bring dangerously high levels of debt that can prove unsustainable for vulnerable African nations.

The lure of short-term benefits for developing or troubled economies while masking long-term burdens is exactly the scenario now playing out in Pakistan, which is becoming progressively subjugated by Chinese loan-based investment

Africa faces immediate, dire, chilling "recolonization" by China. This is extremely important to know about and to call everyone's attention to.

Besides this, Africa has myriad problems we can't solve. One small example: South Africa is driving out its Whites. Someone might say, "Good! They deserve it!" but only a certain type of mind will agree with you. Everyone else sees such a development as both unjust and "racist". Also, as noted above, Africa is being exploited today -- and the Chinese are big into that. They're investing heavily in Africa, and have a military base somewhere in the Horn of Africa now. The point: Does anyone think the Chinese give a damn about "past wrongs" or "colonialism". (Try going to their embassy and protesting their actions.) True, they too were taken advantage of in that way in the past, just look up the Opium War for an example of Western perfidy. But the Opium War doesn't mean modern Britain should be invaded by the Red Chinese People's Liberation Army.

Of course, perhaps you'd still rather live as a subject of the Red Dragon than as a British colonial. Fine. But that's your decision. Others don't have to take it, and it is unjust to force it on them.

More generally about "nations" and "nationalism": People are born into nations that have languages and culture, both language and culture being traditional and rooted in the soil and also in their ancestors' past lives and in the lives and experience of the current generation. It's a holistic experience to be Irish, or German, or Magyar, or whatever. You can't just tell them to forget it, pack up, move aside, go away as their nations now belong to X, or is it Y? Maybe Z. Whoever, someone who able to make a claim that their ancestors were taken advantage of in the past. But beware: people will react very negatively to that.

That's a great way, in short, to start a revolution. And get yourself in serious trouble with everyone around you.

Also, there's no argument in: "My grandfather owned your grandfather, so I have to give you my house." You, yourself, if you want, can do that, but then the obvious question is, (again, as noted above) where do your wife and kids live? You usurp their rights to an identity. Not to mention a home. And what would your brothers and sisters say? And as noted, try to do that to your neighbors and they might attack you.

Bottom line: One generation can't owe its contemporaries for previous generations' sins. First of all, it is simply unjust. But practically, who could possibly determine how much would be owed, and then who would have the power force the redistribution? And then, thirdly, to whom would such redistribution go? Fourthly, who could handle the social upheaval and civil war that would result?

Yet it is the inherent injustice of the idea that prohibits it. An individual is owed the respect every human owes another, and that includes respect for their person and their private property; without respect for private property, we have nothing, because all we have can be taken away. Also, it is theft to take from someone who has done nothing wrong, even if one's ancestors manifestly did not show the natural respect one human owes another.

Example: How could I, being Irish, demand of the English (many of whom are of Irish descent) that they give me a bunch of money because they starved my ancestral family to death, all except for the two who escaped, one to American and the other to Australia?

Then there's slavery today. Sex slavery (usually). We need to stop that before we pontificate on reparation for our ancestors acts. In England, now, today, literally thousands of young English girls have been treated as "sex slaves" by Muslim immigrants and/or their English-born children. That's not something from the past, but all too very much in the present. Or would you dare to consider such repeated rape a good atonement for England's rule of India (and Pakistan)? A just comeuppance?

Related to all this is the perennial and unstoppable problem with Socialism. Socialism is an utopian idea; people simply won't work for free. Elizabeth once told me she thought being a doctor was like being a priest, one did it for conviction, not pay. Well, treat doctors like that and you won't have too many of them.

Far more to the point, [the author] brings ups slavery and colonialism. Islam was essentially -- aside from its famous handful of philosophers who managed to exist for a time after the Asherite takeover -- was a slave-trading empire. From the very beginning, it was all about slaves. Entire peoples were moved about the Middle East by Muslim rulers of various dynasties, and the great city of Alexandria, a wonder of the ancient world and the only purely intellectual and commerce-founded city in the ancient Mediterranean world, in one generation was turned into a fishing village. The Arab conquerors didn't know how to govern it, or even what it was for. So, when the populace rebelled (they were famously hard to rule) the emirs killed off a third of them, sold another third directly into slavery, and moved the rest to their new Egyptian capital city of Cairo.

Problem of what to do with Alexandria solved.

Also, something most of you don't know about: the Viking Age was funded by Arab silver. Arab slave markets on the Black Sea and the Caspian paid Swedes to run newly acquired slaves down the Russian rivers from the Baltic. The Norwegians and Danes captured the slaves in Western Europe and ran then over to the Swedes in the Baltic. So on and so forth.

In other words, why bemoan "the West's" "slavery, neo-colonialism, and imperialism" when it has always been a central element to Islam, and even humanity in general. They've always done so. They still do so. Act today to stop it today.

Finally, as for Trump being, as the Leftist puts it: "ignorant and selfish", well, guess what? Black Americans are doing much better financially under Trump than they ever did under Obama, and indeed, all Americans (legal ones) are doing much better financially under Trump. Jobs, money, companies, all are "coming home" to America, and Trump's popularity keep rising. It's not super high, of course. But it keeps rising slowly. National feeling is strong. And that's just natural, too.

Pretty good for a guy both ignorant and selfish.

An Préachán

Truth About Islam and Fascism

Many folks, whether people of the Left or Middle, seem to argue that Trump's travel ban is xenophobic and racist and that it "demonizes" Islam. Also, that the travel ban (and many other issues) represent a turn of the United States toward "Fascism". 

The Mainstream Media is full of such commentary.

There's an underlying premise here in these arguments, and that is that all cultures are the same, in the end, because all people are the same, bottom line. Sort of like George W. Bush's idea that Muslims everywhere were really wanting "tolerant" Western-style democracies. (I'm sure the Left would find it abhorrent to have anything in common with Bush.) Or that Islam is a good thing, or at least no worse than, say, Methodist or Lutherans are. 

Bush insisted Islam was a good thing. After 9/11, Bush said "Islam" means "Peace". Of course it doesn't. It means "Submission." Somehow Bush didn't know that. (Or, more likely, didn't dare say it.)

In fact, today it is considered outrageous, colonial, racist, and God-knows-what-else to bring up any criticism of Islam.

This "we're all equal" is an underlying premise of all "multi-kulti" ideas. For example, a Leftist I know wrote, "sctotus has just approved trump's ban of travel from seven muslim countries. this is worse than islamophobia, it's demonisation of islam," [sic]

To that I'd answer in specifics:

A: The majority of Muslim nations are not on the travel ban.

B. Many exceptions exist even for the countries that are on the ban.

C. We don't need to "demonize" Islam. It does that itself. Check this article out:

An excerpt: This Cost of Non-Europe report argues that since 2004, terrorism has cost the EU about €185 billion in lost Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and around €5.6 billion in lost lives, injuries, and damage to infrastructure.

Now that is, of course, a bottom line that Western intellectuals and leaders have to finally come to terms with. And they must do so whether they like it or not, or whether it is politically correct or not. It is also a bottom line that the actual European-born people have to actually pay -- in money (and in blood)!

And it is insane. Europe is -- purely in financial terms, leaving aside all the personal pain and cultural disruption -- bleeding itself to death trying to keep local Muslims in control, and more Muslims out. The next couple of decades will decide whether Europe continues to exist at all, and that is the ultimate "bottom line".

So no, no non-Muslim needs to demonize Islam. Far too many Muslims (a minority, but a large minority) are only too willing to demonize it themselves. Therefore, it seems the underlying premise that Muslims are no different than anyone else is flawed. (This naturally refers to the aggregate, not various individuals you may know, or think you know.)

Personally, I've been studying Islam (and the monotheistic religions in general) for a solid 40 years now, and all I can say is that someone who has not read the famous philosopher, mystic, and theologian Al-Ghazali (the Gazelle) 1058 – 1111, or who isn't conversant with the battle between the Asherites and the Mutazilites that went on from the two centuries before Al-Ghazali, just doesn't know enough about Islam to say much of anything.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say it is cultural imperialism NOT to study and understand all this. If you don't study Islam, you don't respect it. Ultimately, far too many Westerners think both religion and philosophy unimportant -- all religions, all philosophy. They could not be more wrong.

This is extremely important. The Asherites won that battle and Islam became essentially an anti-intellectual creed, and this manifests itself today in myriads of ways. The famous Spanish Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126 - 1198), born only 15 years after Al-Ghazali died, his life is also extremely important to know, as how he suffered when the Asherites finally came to Muslim Spain. It's the reason ibn Rushd was the last famous Muslim philosopher.

The other issue I'd bring up is "Fascism". Mussolini coined the term post-WWI, when he, an old-time Communist, created the whole Fascist idea, crossing Socialism with Nationalism. Fascism isn't something of the "Right" but the Left. Hitler was once asked why, since he was a National Socialist, he didn't nationalize the German companies. He laughed and said he had nationalized the German people, and so didn't need to nationalize the companies.

And ironically, the first true Fascist state was created in the United States when then President Woodrow Wilson took the U.S. into World War I. It became a crime to criticize that decision, and U.S. citizens who were German-speakers were penalized and spied on, and children in school (not just German-speaking kids) were encouraged to spy on their parents. The Irish in the US were also singled out this way. 

Woody was a Democrat, too, not a Republican.

Of course, the word "fascism" hadn't even been coined yet.

Now we have massive evidence that the Obama administration "weaponized" the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, and so  on, to spy on Americans involved in political campaigns. People used to make fun of Trump for saying he was spied on. Turns out he was spied on. But this also happened "back in the day". Lyndon Baines Johnson used the FBI to spy on the Nixon campaign, but Nixon, in his turn, hired private contractors to do that, and he was caught and "Watergate" ensued, but LBJ, who "weaponized" the FBI then, and who got us massively involved in Vietnam, was never brought to account.

In other words, "fascism" is a useless term to toss around, except as a weapon. I used to like Garrison Keillor, the US public radio "Prairie Home Companion" funnyman. But then about four or so years ago, before he was brought down by a sexual harassment allegation, I heard him say of Republicans that they were "Brownshirts in pinstripes".

Nothing could be more grotesque, nothing more stupid, nothing more asinine.

Nothing, in short, could be more ignorant. And damning.

RC

Vatican II as a Product of the Church's Impotency During World War I and II

I strongly suspect the Church's grotesque impotency (what other word would suffice) during the World Wars led directly to Vatican II and its aftermath, when the Church did its best to simple cease to exist.

Aggiornamento, or bringing up to date, was merely a surrender. A sort of "if  you can't beat 'em, join 'em" sort of reaction. Consider the background:

The Dutch bishops formally protested the Nazis' treatment of Jews (they joined the other Christian denominations on July 11, 1942, in sending a letter to the Nazi general ironically named Friedrich Christiansen). This letter was read in all Catholic churches against German opposition. The Nazis reacted with a total smackdown, and revoked all previous exemptions and so on, and rounded up everyone remotely connected to Jews. It was a disaster, but it was in actually a strategically placed message to Pope Pius XII to keep quiet.

Now this is a minefield, of course: Pius XII and the Jews. I make no judgement because "the Dutch example" made it obvious that the Nazis were willing to shoot every priest, nun, monk, and the old ladies who dusted the churches, were Pius to make a big stink. Pius knew that, and he knew that were he to produce a big-time, world-wide declaration, not only would many religious be murdered, but a lot more Jews would die than he could sneak out or hide. That's certainly what befell Jews in Holland, where the Church had been pretty successful on the Q/T in hiding Jews hither and yon. All that stopped after July 11, 1942.

But let's suppose Benedict 15, pope during WWI, had -- say about the time of Verdun -- gotten up and excommunicated every Catholic man in Europe who dared continue fighting. And then what if he pronounced damnation on any leaders who continued the war via the medieval anathema by "bell, book, and candle", The phrase "bell, book, and candle" is 'medieval speak' for excommunication by anathema, or making one accursed. Modern Catholics fall all over each other to say, "Oh, no! We don't ever damn anyone!" but here I mean, what if Benedict XV had meant exactly, that?

Such a full broadside, take no prisoners policy might have worked in WWI. It would have created consternation, outrage, and all sorts of blah blah from the "Deep State" people of the time, but the masses might have gone along with it. Pressure would have mounted inexorably for the war to stop, I suspect. We can't know, but it might have worked. Better than a 50-50 chance.

As for WWII, doing that would have brought about the martyrdom of multitudes -- but there's a chance it too, maybe, might have worked. Suppose Pius XII did it in such a way as to directly, fully, without doubt, challenge Adolf Hitler personally. It would have been a request for Martyrdom on Pius' part, there's no doubt of that. I think there is little doubt Hitler would have ordered his execution and the occupation of the Vatican City State. (IIRC, Hitler either talked about that or even tried to order it at some late point, but I'd have to check -- if so, it didn't happen.)

Suppose either pope tried these scenarios? WWI might have ended by November 1916 and not Nov 1918, and Hitler's butcher of most of the Church, from its earthly head to the lowest pew-sitters, would have probably lead to his overthrow -- there were many plots to kill him, and a "public relations disaster" on that scale -- of murdering the pope, for Heaven's sake, would have probably forced the issue. We can't know. Maybe. Maybe not.

But my point, the point of all this speculation, is this: AFTERWARDS, the Church's status would have been supreme. Stalin would not have had to ask "How many divisions does the pope have?" The Church's credibility would have been out to the orbit of Pluto.

Any you can bet your last farthing that there would never have been a Vatican II.

We don't know what would have happened, but we know what did. Benedict did little, and no one except Emperor Karl V listened to him (only for Karl to be deposed after the war, soon die in a miserable exile) and that while Pius XII worked assiduously behind the scenes to rescue Jews, even directly ordering his nuncio in Turkey (one Angelo Roncalli) to get with that program (the future John 23 had hesitated to use his diplomatic status in such a way), still, he, Pius, was maligned by anti-Catholics as a Nazi stooge.

No wonder the Church leaders post-WWI were "lower than a snakes belly". Pius himself seemed to see the Apocalypse coming, and stopped appointing Cardinals, and let that foul Bug, Bugnini, do his thing in the bowels of the Vatican's liturgical bureaucracy. (What a lot of people don't remember is that Bugnini trashed out the Easter Week celebrations back in the mid 1950s!)

Church History, the last thousand years -- condensed!

Here's my condensed History of the Catholic Church, The Last Thousand Years:

In the High Middle Ages Church, from about 1054 to 1300: (i.e. from the final split with the East to a couple of decades after the death of Aquinas in 1274), God was pleased with us and He gave us Saints Francis and Dominic and Norbert, and capped 'em all with Thomas of Aquinas. Then in the Later Middle Ages Church, we embraced William of Ockam and Marsilius of Padua, and were cowardly enough to let the Kings of France hijack the papacy, so God gave us Luther & Co. as Chastisement. Learning our lesson, we prayed for mercy and He gave us the Jesuits (the original version; perhaps, pound for pound, the best religious order we've ever had) and the Counter-Reformation Church(1540-1648) full-flowered! We nearly retook all of Europe.

But then we threw it all away because of two Catholic Churchmen (the Prots weren't a real enemy: they were routed whenever faced with Truth, Faith, and Tradition). No, we shot ourselves in the collective foot again by idiotically electing that ass Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII, a braying donkey who promptly made a fool of the Church in the Galileo affair (because Galileo insulted him -- sure, let's make the Church into a harlequin for that reason! /sarc), and then Barberini wrecked the entire Counter-Reformation by betraying the Habsburgs in the Thirty Years War! How'd he pull off that feat? Barberini supported the French who were knifing the Habsburgs (also spelled 'Hapsburgs") in the back by supporting that atheist Richelieu! Idiota!.

So God kicked us off the porch and let us stew in the mud puddle bordello of the Bourbon Church, from 1648-1789. The Bourbon Church was summed up by the wry comment of Louis XV, when some cronies of his tried to foist one of their own on him for a lucrative Church post, "Gentlemen," Louis said languidly, in that droll way of his, "Gentlemen, the archbishop of Paris must at least believe in God."

We barely survived the following Great Chastisement God inflicted on us by means of the French Revolution and then Napoleon. Barely. The Vatican I Church was a desperate attempt at survival, a Festung Katholica, from 1846 to 1963, when it was morally defeated by World War I and World War II. The Modernists were already, like termites, eating it out from inside, but the coup de grace was that no one was interested in what the Church had to say about either world war, and the Church was impotent (and had been, since the Thirty Years War, actually) to stop either war, or stop the Darwinian-based slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, Capitalists, entrepreneurs, or whoever didn't fit the Nazi and Soviet-Man ideology. (Today, its de-masculinized and can't even fight off the lavender Mafia types who infest it!)

So it was merely washed away by the Modernists, who clandestinely organized before the Vat II Council and seized control of it in the first session. Therefore, ironically, what started out as German Protestants in the 19th century, incredibly, are German Protestants today, although dressed in Catholic colors, who fully and clearly desire to murder the Church entirely.

By "murder" I mean turn it into a 21st century Anglican/Lutheran Mess, Spaghetti Version.

Enlightenment, de-lightenment: The Fix Is in in Western Thought

For a Protestant, "Faith" means a "leap of faith" (see Søren Kierkegaard for an explanation of that). Catholic Faith, on the other hand, is the willing acceptance of divine revelation and the witness of the Church because they are true. They're reasonable, in fact.

For example, St. Paul says in 1 Cor 15 that 500 of the brothers saw the Risen Christ at one time -- and 500 was the size of an Athenian jury when a man was on trial for his life, so Ft. Paul is saying he has evidence that would pass the legal system of the greatest city-state of the Ancient World. 

Faith as "blind faith," a leap in the dark, is based purely on self will, or rather self desire. One wants something to be true whether it is or not and one is willing to jump into the dark for it.

"Man is the Measure of All Things" is a Renaissance idea. I think the real "black hat" in Western Culture is none other than Nick, Niccolo Machiavelli. René Descartes and his Mechanical Physics was the "icing on the cake" that sealed the doom of Western Man, and that was highlighted by the wide acceptance of the teachings of that true and certain idiot, David Hume. Humie should be read only to be laughed at and yet today he's considered the dean of the Enlightenment (my understanding is the Enlightenment meant to be enlightened that God didn't exist).

And a prime directive of the Enlightenment was to come up with a metaphysical materialistic way to explain life on Earth. None other than a certain Erasmus was a leading proponent of such an idea during the Enlightenment, and this particular Erasmus came up with a theory of evolution very much like the one his grandson would come up with thereafter. Yes, I refer to none other than Erasmus Darwin and his grandson Charlie. 

In other words, "the fix is in" in Western thinking going back now some hundreds of years. There's a long, old, complicated story being unwound right now. Vatican II and its despicable "spirit" is on a tip of the pimple that has to be popped, if I may be excused for being vulgar.

An Préachán

Reflections on Schism

The whole Schism thing is a control mechanism. 

It keeps an outraged laity in a straight jacket.

Short of murder out in the middle of the street, or cursing God directly and fornicating proudly at the village fountain, the worst thing a priest or bishop can do is "foment Schism". 

Yet that weapon is used to beat up on the orthodox today, not the schismatics -- for, forsooth! -- it is the Schismatics who are are in control and they're the ones fomenting Schism.

So, now what?

An Préachán

Did 19th Century Protestant "Higher Biblical Criticism" first appear during the Reformation?

Some things never change. Protestants smashing up the Bible in the 19th century? Cutting of the limb they were sitting on (it would seem to be a classic example of that). Well, no wonder. That's what Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and the rest were doing 400 years before "Modernism" began.

What thoughts occur to you when you least expect them! One can say, with the moderns, that you were subconsciously "thinking" about an issue involved over some period of time, and then, finally, it surfaces to conscious thought.

Maybe. Or maybe your Guardian Angel was able to finally get a thought into your thick skull. As for me, I'm betting the latter.

It's occurred to me that one of the pillars of "Modernism" -- that heresy gutting the Church today (and for the past 60+ years) -- specifically the pillar known as "Higher Biblical Criticism" or more vaguely "Historical Criticism", was really already going on in the Protestant Churches back in the 16th century. It would explain a lot.

•  Higher Biblical Criticism trashes out the Bible, making it a potpourri of religious writings concocted over time and that bear no real, essential relationship to spiritual reality.

This has seeped into every Christian clann. 

Like a modern Catholic, a modern Protestant is either a Progressive / Liberal, or a Fundamentalist / more conservative one, and the great dividing line is their view of the Bible. This is essential, for otherwise confusion reigns in trying to classify them. 

• A modern Protestant might be an Anglican (Episcopalian) or Calvinist (Presbyterian -- here in Hungary they're called "Kalvinist" directly) or a Lutheran: those sorts are usually Progressives. Of course, conservative "break-away" versions exist of each of these. In the U.S., the Missouri Synod Lutherans would fit that bill.
• Like ancient Gaul, one can divide the rest of the Protestant tribe into three: the serious-style worshipers who -- whatever their liturgy or lack of it -- do not go into emotionalism. (These can be "on-line" Protestant Churches of a purely Progressive belief matrix, or Fundamentalist-style groups not Progressive.)
• The Evangelicals, which in American usage are the more emotional, feel-good-style worshipers, and who often belong to "non-denominational" bodies. 
• And then the Pentecostals, who are hang-your-reason-on-the-coat-rack-when-you-come-in types. They go over into pure emotionalism and a sort of spiritual soup, and wouldn't know if they're worshiping God, Allah, the Devil, Brahma, Kali, or the Emperor of Japan.

Most of the Fundamentalists are strict "Bible Christians", meaning, in their own minds, they fully accept the inerrancy of Holy Writ; it is, to them, the Word of God and truly a case of Sola Scriptura. They're named Fundamentalists in the first place because they rebuked the 19th century Protestant Modernists, for instance, in Germany, of the Tübingen School. This rebuke was found in the English-language world in the Schofield Reference Bible (1909) and then The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.published between 1910 and 1915 and that would finally include 90 essays written by 64 authors from various denominations. 

So, in theory. the various Baptists would be more of a Fundamentalist Christian in this sense. (Mainstream Media has hopelessly over-used and confused the word "Fundamentalist" with Muslims, for instance, and so on, people who in general do violence in the name of religion. And that is no accident: it is a feature, not a bug.) But you can find Progressive Baptists, just as you find Progressive Catholics. The Progressive/Fundamentalist divide crosses every denomination. And the way to tell is to ask questions about the Bible.

And thus we come back to Holy Writ. Just as the 19th century Modernists trashed out the Bible, so did the Reformers of the 16th century. Luther, for example, is widely known to have added "alone" in German to his German-language translation of Romans 3:28, and to have wanted to excise the Epistle of James from the New Testament. In fact, Luther put James, the letter to the Hebrews, the letters of John, and the book of Revelation (my favorite NT book) into an appendix. 

Luther went on this rampage because 2 Maccabees 12:43-46 involves prayers for the dead and thus supports the doctrine of Purgatory, while Hebrews clearly embraces the existence of the priesthood, and of course James 2:24 clearly promotes the Catholic doctrine of merit -- in general, James is contra Luther in every aspect, and Luther called it "an epistle of straw".

What is less widely known is that he massively redacted the New Testament and to have re-interpreted various passages insanely badly, insisting that passages clearly supporting Faith and the necessity of Christian Charity as meaning just the opposite. People of all Christian stripes should know he left out the Apocrypha writing from the Old Testament -- but he did so because praying fore the dead appeared in 2 Maccabees, for instance.

But what dawned on me was that all that Protestant reinterpretation of the Bible to mean what no one in the previous millennium and a half of Christianity thought it meant was -- fundamentally (to coin a phrase) -- the first appearance of "Higher Biblical Criticism". What is Higher Criticism but an assertion that "We know what this means, YOU don't!" Isn't that what Luther said? And isn't that what the early Mondernists, such as Ferdinand Christian Baur (d. December 1860), founder and leader of the Tübingen School (i.e., University of Tübingen) down to Rudolf Bultmann (d. 1976) and his demythologizing" of the Bible. 

(Other names of "this ilk" include: Ernest Renan (d. 1892), Adolf von Harnack (d. 1930), and in Catholicism: Alfred Loisy, and so on. You know, down to Pope Francis.)

So, honestly, "trashing" out the Bible goes a long way back, and seems anchored -- by no means wholly. but in a large degree -- in the restless German soul. 

But more basic than that, Protestantism is a manifestation in church internationalism of Modernism and Bible trashing. 

Interesting.

An Préachán

Lamenting the Irish Americans and the Irish 19th Century Church

Irish Americans.

Irish Americans.

What is an Irish-American (formally spelled with a hyphen, and thus Theodore Roosevelt's "hyphenated American" put down)?

Good question. 

Most Irish Americans don't know they're Irish. Where I grew up (by odd circumstance) was on the Appalachians borderlands, where Catholics were rare or, if found, German or Italian. (Not many of either of those, to be sure). But a great many of the people had red hair, drank whiskey, fist-fought at the drop of a pin, and told wondrous stories. They were the Ulster Scots, of course. 

Ulster Scots, with a good mix of non-Ulster Scot Irish, too (I knew Casey's and so on with Irish-names who were as Protestant as John Knox).

"The Peopling of Ireland" is a complex tale, We don't know even when the Celtic language arrived, or where from. It has been there so long, however, as J.R.R. Tolkien once noted, as to have done most of it's evolution there. Unlike English, which was a mostly evolved language when it came to Prydain (Britannia, Britain, Alba, as the big island in the archipelago is known; the Welsh call England Lloegyr, the lost territories).

And if you travel about The West in Ireland, you'll note -- if you've traveled in Spain -- how many of them look like Spaniards or Portuguese. Once, in Donegal at the great Irish course in Gleann Colm Cille, a drought was on, and the whole area turned brown. It looked exactly like Galicia. And it made the black-haired locals look all the more Iberian. All that because Ireland, Brittany, and Galicia/Portugal are "Atlantic Europe", and you can see on a globe (a flat map won't do it) how close they are to each other.

But as for the Irish Americans, in the sense of what I'd call the "city Irish," who were, originally, mostly Catholic, it's easy to disparage then. I've been disgusted with them far more often than not. I well remember an Irish priest of my acquaintance, an old man, Irish-born, you understand, berating a guy dressed in a pathetically outrageous Irish leprechaun costume (this was years ago) at the Dublin (Ohio) Irish Festival.

But as a blogger One Peter Five wrote, "The Irish should be Catholic, not Irish, the latter being." as the blogger wrote: "...largely a filth culture which emphasizes wicked practices such as drunkenness, immodest dancing, and a permissiveness to blatant paganism under the guise of 'culture', because it's 'Irish'. "

Assume for a moment that is mostly true, and alas, it too often is, on both sides of the Atlantic. But I would stress where we got that miserable culture of drink, dance, and the devil. Take dancing for example; Traditional dancing in Ireland was group dancing, and when one danced, one danced with the whole village, in essence. Who invented modern dance? A person gyrating in sexually suggestive gyrations, alone, in a mass of other zombies doin' the same, all to "music" so loud it would deafen a basalt rock?

The Irish embraced "rock and roll" but they didn't invent it.

We got that foreign, outside culture from the Outside, and the Church in Ireland, the 19th century Church, now, facilitated that, all in order to remove from the Irish their own culture and language, all in order to make them "West Brits". And it was THAT Church that drilled into us the Three Unbreakable Commandments: Pray. Pay, and Obey. It was that Church, a materialistic one, a promoter of "prosperity" and "modernism" before even the Protestant  Germans got around to inventing "Modernism" in the 1860s (the Tübingen School of theology) that laid us low and removed our defenses and ancient cultural immunity against foreign contagion.

And, friends, is it now a wonder at all that their "spiritual descendants" of Vatican II and that Ilk (both in Ireland and the largely Irish-derived American Catholic Church) left us with this mess of an abortion regime coming to Ireland?

“So in the Libyan fable it is told

That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,

Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,

With our own feathers, not by others' hands,

Are we now smitten.”

―Aeschylus

RC

Ranked Voting Comes to Maine and the Best Form of Democracy?

News that Ranked Choice Voting has come to Maine is making a bit of (small time) political news. Ireland has it. Alas, I know Ireland only too well. Oh, I'm fine with Maine trying it, and I wouldn't mind some states trying a unicameral legislature (as Nebraska has, only note that it is also "nonpartisan") only on the British Parliamentary model. The states are supposed to be "laboratories of democracy". after all. Go for it.

That said, Ranked Choice Voting is a disaster because it gives us a mish-mash of professional politicians, making for crazy-quilt, small party legislatures in which the embedded, unextractable Bureaucrats are the only ones to rule.

If you want TRUE democracy, (as the Ancient Greeks found, who tried just about every form of "people rule" possible) chose legislatures by lottery, much as you'd chose juries. I.e., choose by lottery people who passed certain basic qualifications (no criminal record, etc.) to represent districts. As William F. Buckley famously put it, "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."

For the simple truth is, AS LONG AS YOU HAVE "professional" politicians, you'll have a class of buffoons who only look out for their re-election. They "represent" only themselves. It's as simple as that.

More on the Irish abortion vote

The following is a post I left at this article on the Irish abort vote at One Peter Five.

The author notes: 
"The RTE exit poll indicated that 87.6% of 18-24-year olds voted for abortion. The majority of these young men and women were educated in Catholic schools in Ireland under the patronage of Irish bishops. They were not properly catechised."

An ea? Is that so? I do NOT doubt it, but dar Crom (by Jove) where in all the round world were these kids' parents? Where? Ireland? Earth? Mars? Vacationing on Pluto?

In a major way, I am glad I was raised among Protestants. Old School types in a rural public school where preachers often stopped by to visit. I had to fight for the Faith from grade school, and the mainstream Church (in America now, and the same in Ireland by all accounts) taught me nothing. But something is amiss in all this, and that something is big: the parents.

My mother's only brother to have children had four, and sent them to a Catholic school in Columbus, Ohio, after the consolidation into three large schools from the old parish schools (where everyone knew each other and the nuns taught). None of this uncle's kids have the Faith today (well, one died a few years ago, an alcoholic, divorced, but I knew him the least -- he stopped by at an Irish festival when I was telling Irish-language stories once, a big guy, a classic "Mic": red-haired, mustached, looked 19th century. (Far more Irish-looking than meself, dontcha know? :) But one of his daughters was with him, and he introduced us; I gave 'em both my contact info but never heard/saw 'em again).

But my uncle often complained to my mother, his sister, how uneducated in the Faith his brood were, but c'mon! Where was his Faith? Didn't he dare teach them what he had learned "back in the day" at the old Aquinas High School? (That school was famous but somehow suppressed by the bishop; perhaps an early Spirit of Vat2 attack?) Apparently not. He was passive. And I can honestly say that if the Divil himself ran for mayor as a Democrat, and St. Anthony or whoever ran as a Republican, he would have voted for the former without a thought. Poor man. And you know, he never missed a Mass.

RC

Part III on the Irish abortion vote

One more bit to go...

So, an Irish-speaking country of young families – and the oldest version of Catholicism outside of the bounds of the later Roman Empire – became an English-speaking country wherein the men and women married late, if at all. And with a Church whose primary function seemed to be to encourage its members to forget the past. Historians of Ireland and the Church now that in the 1800s and into the 1950s, the Irish Catholic Church was the most Progressive, modernizing element in the country’s society. I’ve tried to explain this at Irish festivals in the U.S. (I used to teach Irish at these, and tell Irish-language folktales.) But I was usually laughed at by someone, usually a woman (with red hair, or so it seemed) at how stupid such an assertion was. That just showed their ignorance, of course.

One final point about marrying late: In my mother's mother’s people, of three daughters and one son, only one daughter (the youngest and most American) married, and in my mother's father's family, of two brothers and three or four sisters, only the two brothers married, and one of them "married late" and had no children. In other words, the people were "neutered" culturally and in family life and creation.

And the Church, <i>dar Crom</i>, it would have driven me back to the old religion of an <i>tSlua Sí</i>, the Noble People of the Hills. It was a Jansenist Church, on one hand, and on the other, materialistic. It's schools -- such as they existed, esp in the U.S. were all about attaining material progress. For example, did you know that Communists in England in the later 1800s and early 1900s said the Irish were the easiest to lure away into atheism? Engels' own live-in girlfriend (Mary) was a Byrne (she spelled it "Burns", and could have easily been related to some of my people). When she died (of alcoholism, of course) he took up with her sister.

Now, "payment is due". The "Celtic Tiger" (also known as the Emerald Tiger) made yuppies of a large portion of the Irish, and the thin gruel of their parents' religion offered little resistance.

Of course the Irish hadlittle in the way of rebellion toward Vat II and its baleful spirit, to begin with, as well-noted by Commentators here. Just some stats and thoughts. Poland Ireland ain't. Not remotely. A "Catholic Country"? Well, in many ways, here and there. Once upon a time. We'll see just how much it remains so.

An Précháin

Section Two of More Thoughts on the Irish vote...

Part 2 A bit more detail:

When the French Revolution began and the revolutionaries closed the Irish seminaries on the Continent, the English took the opportunity to "make a deal" with the Irish. “We'll give you a seminary in Ireland (that would be Maynooth) and allow you to have bishops and even build churches, all that, but in return you have to stop all this independence nonsense, and that includes suppressing the Irish language and the native culture.” Why? Why make that a condition? Because the Irish language and the Irish-Gaelic culture it embodied made the people <i>NOT English</i>. The Irish could never become "West Britain" while speaking a "foreign" language and having an outlandish culture.

I mean a culture, you must remember, that was rooted so long ago, and tested so brutally in the 300 years previous to the Famine in the 1840s, that it had made one people (excepting the Orangemen in the North, who were Scottish implants) where before they had been an endless series of tribes, clans, and ancient kingdoms. (Here’s a tidbit for you: if you want to see what Ireland looked like on a map in terms of tribes and kingdoms, look at a map of the Irish dioceses; forget the counties – those were English creations. https://www.catholicbishops.ie/dioceses/  Raphoe was the O'Donnell territory, Derry the O'Neill, and so on.)

So, the Church agreed with this pact with the Freemason-ruled Mother England. They made a pact with the Devil Himself, and -- aside from a few famous exceptions such as Archbishop MacHale of Connacht, born when the French Revolution began, 1789, and dying in 1881) the Church leaders bent over backwards to get rid of anything 'Irish" -- the language, An Ghaeilge, agus gach rud eile go leor, i.e., the whole that made the Irish a "community" connected to their past. This was psychological warfare, and a preemptive attack on the Irish national identity. It is part of the reason why Ireland isn't like Poland or where I reside now, Hungary. In these two countries, the Church supported their indigenous populations and their ancient languages. But the Irish Church drove a stake through the heart of Éire.

Then the Famine hit, <i>an t-Ocras Mór</i>. Now, here are some stats you've never heard, not least because the Irish are loathe to know them. In 1840, the country had a population of about 8 million people, and of those, we don't know (no question about language existed on the census in those days) how many spoke Irish, but the Guesstimate is that about 4 to 5 million of them spoke Irish. The entire western half of the country (with a high-density population and where people married very young and had lots of kids) spoke Irish, and it was also existing in strong pockets throughout the east side, and even in what is now the Six Counties. In other words, and read this twice, there were more people speaking Irish in Ireland than the entire population of Holland and Sweden combined, or that of Holland and Portugal.

Think about that.

Ten years later, in 1850, the population was 5 million. Most of those who died (either starved or dying of the resulting diseases) were Irish speakers. So were those who managed to emigrate on the "coffin ships". This is, my friends, the greatest language shift in European history, bar none (in terms of numbers and the short time in which it occurred). AND the English exported food from the country throughout the Famine. (The only country in Europe where that occurred; the potato blight infested all Europe.) The Famine was intentional. John Bull took advantage of his opportunities.

And the Irish seem to have either forgotten it entirely or have some in-built psychological block not to "get it" or even care. It's a ghost that only haunts the hills, not the nightclubs. No doubt the Church's position -- well established by then -- played a significant role in this.

More thoughts on the Irish vote...

This is the first section of a three-part piece I submitted as a Commentator to OnePeterFive:

I posted a similar Irish-vote essay as the one I’m sharing with you below a while ago and I’ve gone through it again for posting here. It will be in a couple of sections. Commentator LB236 wrote in a Comment below that, “I am no expert in Ireland or its history—what little I know comes from anecdotes mentioned in other books on Catholicism I have read—but I refuse to believe a nation that kept the Faith in the midst of persecution for so long would have as a nation apostasized were it not for the destruction of the Mass that nourished the faithful for so long.”

That is, to some extent, true, and it is true for not just Ireland, but the Church Universal. <b>However:</b> the "nation that kept the Faith in the midst of persecution fro so long" is not the English-speaking, post-Famine Ireland. The Penal Laws were over by the time of the Great Famine. It was an Irish-speaking Éire that kept the Faith under centuries of English Protestant persecution -- and even before England became Protestant, they kept two distinct Churches in Ireland, one for the Irish and one for the English colonists.

Yes, everyone is wringing their hands over Ireland, but it is SO important, for everyone, to know Irish history, that <i>nightmare,</i> as James Joyce put it, <i>from which he was trying to awake.</i> Two major, powerful, screamingly important things need to be understood: First, until about 180 years ago, or four Biblical generations now (three score & ten plus some overlap): is that Ireland was one kind of nation since Patrick came in the 400s all the way to 1846, and another nation entirely from the post-Famine period down to the “Celtic Tiger”. Before the Famine, Ireland was mostly Irish-speaking. Celtic realm, founded in an ancient Faith imparted over a thousand and a half years before; after the Famine, very few would admit to even knowing the language. (My great-aunts were Irish-speakers but wouldn’t teach it to my mother, for example. “We’re lace-curtain Irish,” they actually told her – but their parents spoke no English when they immigrated into the U.S. And my great-aunts were desperate to hide that fact.)

Regarding Ireland’s language shift, there’s been a complete changeover in a way unique in European history. In other words, the country you-all think of as “Ireland” is a new construct, rootless, languageless, and in a powerful way, spiritless. By that I mean the Irish Church from the early 1800s to today is <i>NOT</i> the Irish Church of any time before 1800. It was a half-Jansenist Church, promoting English and trying to eradicate anything unique Irish or Celtic about it. (There were exceptions: see Archbishop John MacHale, 1791 to 1881.) The religion my grandmother and mother had was devoid of any Irish (as in long-established Celtic) roots. It only took over Ireland in the post-Famine era, and was “a mile wide and an inch deep” for that Biblical generation who lived from the creation of the Irish Free State to today.

Second point: this Abort vote was rigged. I’m not saying it was rigged for the aborts to win but rigged to win big. Win by a ridiculous margin. And this was done precisely to stymie debate. Yes, yes, sure, Ireland of today wasn’t what it was even as late as the 1980s, but these vote totals were to do as JGP Connolly, the author of the main article here, writes, “The margin of victory for abortion was too huge for there to be any doubt.”

Exactly. Precisely. That’s the point. And I know enough Irish history, modern and otherwise, plus a tremendous amount of American history and “machine politics” to know the Irish <i>never</i> have had a proper election. Why should they? They’re clannish, as clannish as Appalachians (I’m one of those too), and they’ve never accepted the standard Western Civ meme of the importance of the individual. That’s first of all; second of all, they had the English (God help us!) as teachers and exemplars in the art of democracy (insane laughter, chocking, some minutes of restoring calm). Every time in history, from the Middle Ages on, whenever English-planted parliaments slowly evolved into true democratic institutions in Ireland, the English squashed ‘em. It happened as late at the last all-island vote ever held in the country, in December 1918, it happened in the later 1800s with Parnell and a half generation before Parnell, with O'Connell, in the 1700s when the Brits squashed the Irish parliament; it just has happened over and over and over again. So why would the Irish have any “democratic” genes?

Part 1

Was the Irish voted rigged? Fraudulent? Other Irish Abortion vote thoughts

The following entry consists of a couple of blog comments I entered on OnePeterFive about the Irish Pro-Abort vote. First:

As always, I'm "a day late and a dollar short" on posting, but as I just posted to the original article here and 1P5, the Irish vote was a fraud. And actually, what is most disturbing about this is that so few seem to care. Read the following article for plenty of evidence why it was a fraudulent vote, and general info on how ridiculously sloppy the Irish voting is.
Was the Irish Abortion vote rigged?
In any other country on planet earth, a gaping chasm of 22 percent between opinion polls and official results would be laughed off the stage. 
https://www.henrymakow.com/...

Then, to a blogger chastising me for bring up a crazy conspiracy site, and quoting them and raising the question, giving such "nuts" a venue, I wrote...

Second:

Thank you for telling me this, but first, obviously, just because a conspiracy theorist reports something doesn't mean it isn't true. One has to go into the details to debunk it. Sort of like the "911 Truthers". I've had to do a search on the Net to debunk a local person here who believes the whole "Truther" deal. And fortunately, there's been thorough investigations over the years to disprove them.

So, show me the Irish government's (or the EU's) thorough investigation into Irish voting. Can't do that? Hmmm.... And show me Ireland's equivalent of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. Can't do that either? Hmmm....

See, I'm a journalist -- at least trained as one at the best J-School in the US (at Ohio University) and I've worked in textbook publishing and in and around politics for ages. (I'm 60 now.) And I know there is simply no lengths the Left or whatever you want to call it won't go to get what they want. Vote fraud is basic to them.

And the American Democrat Party was run by the Irish from the mid-1800s till WWII (it was the Irish Pendergast machine that put Harry Truman into the Vice-Presidency by cutting the phone cables to the Convention hall to prevent FDR from getting his then-current Veep, Henry Wallace, reappointed.

I've seen in my own years of experience how the Democrats will stop at nothing to cheat the vote, and I'm sure the same has occurred in Ireland. And as I've noted earlier, I've spent enough time in Ireland to actually an Ghaeilge a fhoghlaim, agus is breá liom na Irish to drive mad by promoting it and speaking it, when so many of them loathe it. (A sinful pleasure, perhaps, but they're so NOT used to contrary views.)

I actually worked in an Irish language bookstore for a year, speaking Irish all day to the point I could nearly forget "the Englishry" of the poor country. And that was in the greater Dublin area.

Excuse the length of this, but it's all by way of saying:
A I know something of the Irish, past and present. They are in their nature closed-minded, obstinate, and in that sense "conservative": i.e. it took the English manipulating the potato blight to murder or exile a third of the Irish population in order to change their language and "break" them of rebellion (didn't work, that aspect of it) but once they changed the language, they wouldn't change back! Conturtach is a good word to describe 'em.
B I'm biased both for and against them, loving so many of them alive now, and so many more of them dead in the past, when they kept, and defended, at terrible cost, a magnificent language and culture so tenaciously, and loathing a great deal of them too for dumping the same (and praying about 'em, despite that).
C I'm quite aware of their politics, both at home in 'the State" and abroad in how they manifest themselves historically and in the present day.
D I can readily believe they'd "vote" for "gay marriage" and abortion, to some extent, but when the vote is 22 percent in favor of death, c'mon, I'm not going to believe that. They're the most child-orientated people I've lived among -- I'm now in Hungary, which is desperately trying to encourage Hungarians to give birth, because the nation will cease to exist in another century or so. And I know the Irish are changing fast, all true, but to this extent?

And finally E: it is so easy for Trad Catholics to be negative. Dour. Gritty and grim. We've been lied to so often and the Church is such an unholy mess, all that.

Yet I remain enough of an optimist to insist that this recent Irish vote doesn't really exhibit the majority's will. But, we'll see.

An Préachán

911 Truthers still with us, alas

I was having a lively discussion with a local person recently about 911, and was surprised at their adamant belief that the US was behind the 911 disasters. So I did a bit of checking on the Net, just casually, and found plenty of rebuttals from every angle. Below are a few links with bits of info.

I'll pass 'em along here, just FYI. My wife says people in Hungary are pron to believe any such sort of stuff. Alas, it seems to be true.

The shortest, most readable one was from Australia, actually:

https://www.news.com.au/world/six-really-stupid-911-conspiracies-debunked-in-about-six-seconds/news-story/a59cdac9a894a786544f96b8b7893cee

Check it out for brevity. The author notes that "PSYCHOLOGISTS will tell you that even perfectly sane people have the ability to accept wild conspiracy theories. The more powerless or alone we feel, the more likely we are to develop such theories."

For a highly detailed series of articles, check out these by Popular Mechanics. Below is the link to one of them and a small excerpt from all the material available.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6384/debunking-911-myths-world-trade-center/

Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report - The World Trade Center

The following content is from an in-depth investigation of the conspiracy theories surround the attacks of 9/11, which was published in the March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics. That cover story was expanded and published in August 2006 as a book titled Debunking 9/11 Myths. The fully revised and updated 2011 edition of the book is now on sale.

The collapse of both World Trade Center towers—and the smaller WTC 7 a few hours later—initially surprised even some experts. But subsequent studies have shown that the WTC's structural integrity was destroyed by intense fire as well as the severe damage inflicted by the planes. That explanation hasn't swayed conspiracy theorists, who contend that all three buildings were wired with explosives in advance and razed in a series of controlled demolitions.

Widespread Damage

Claim: The first hijacked plane crashed through the 94th to the 98th floors of the World Trade Center's 110-story North Tower; the second jet slammed into the 78th to the 84th floors of the 110-story South Tower. The impact and ensuing fires disrupted elevator service in both buildings. Plus, the lobbies of both buildings were visibly damaged before the towers collapsed. "There is NO WAY the impact of the jet caused such widespread damage 80 stories below," claims a posting on the San Diego Independent Media Center Web site (sandiego.indymedia.org). "It is OBVIOUS and irrefutable that OTHER EXPLOSIVES (... such as concussion bombs) HAD ALREADY BEEN DETONATED in the lower levels of tower one at the same time as the plane crash."

FACT: Following up on a May 2002 preliminary report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a major study will be released in spring 2005 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST shared its initial findings with PM and made its lead researcher available to our team of reporters.

The NIST investigation revealed that plane debris sliced through the utility shafts at the North Tower's core, creating a conduit for burning jet fuel—and fiery destruction throughout the building. "It's very hard to document where the fuel went," says Forman Williams, a NIST adviser and a combustion expert, "but if it's atomized and combustible and gets to an ignition source, it'll go off."

Burning fuel traveling down the elevator shafts would have disrupted the elevator systems and caused extensive damage to the lobbies. NIST heard first-person testimony that "some elevators slammed right down" to the ground floor. "The doors cracked open on the lobby floor and flames came out and people died," says James Quintiere, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland and a NIST adviser. A similar observation was made in the French documentary "9/11," by Jules and Gedeon Naudet. As Jules Naudet entered the North Tower lobby, minutes after the first aircraft struck, he saw victims on fire, a scene he found too horrific to film.

Ron again: Too horrific to film. Oh, well, a "Truther" would say it wasn't filmed because it didn't happen. But whatever. This is just one of the Popular Mechanics pieces. See also:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a5654/debunking-911-myths-planes/

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a5688/debunking-911-myths-flight-93/

Wikipedia has an article on the book that resulted from PM's research:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debunking_9/11_Myths

The left-wing Guardian had an article on this, too:

Here's the link an an excerpt:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/05/9-11-conspiracy-theories-debunked

Israel was behind the attacks in order to draw America into a conflict with Arab nations
The evidence claimed for this theory is that 4,000 Jews who supposedly worked at the WTC failed to report for work on 11 September because they had been forewarned by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad.
However, the figure appears to be based on a statement made by the Israeli foreign minister that about 4,000 Israelis were in the cities under attack at the time. More than one in ten of those who died on 9/11 were Jewish.

Here's a piece from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp news people:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/september-2001-truther-conspiracy-theory-1.3756431

And here's one from the BBC, from earlier this year:

Here’s the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42195513

Subsequent investigations made it clear that the tower structures were weakened by the inferno from the planes and felled by the weight of collapsing floors. However even now some people refuse to believe this version of events.

An Préachán: People like a scapegoat. Quite often, historically, it was the Jews, and often also the Freemasons. George Soros certainly causes endless trouble, but though of Jewish descent, he is about as Jewish at a rock on Mars somewhere. And Freemasons do indeed, some of them, here and there, work assiduously to further their ends, as do the Communists on their "long march" through Western institutions and academia and education in general. All true. A good portion of the Muslim world is no more radical than a Methodist or a Baptist, but yet -- oh so obviously -- it isn't the latter two who are murdering and raping across the world in such insane fashion. 

However, the real problem is a bit closer to home, in our own natures.

Very difficult to understand our own inner thoughts and motivations -- very difficult indeed. But we are the reasons we let these others manipulate us, to the extent they actually ever do.