When anyone refers to Hitler or the Nazis as “right-wing” or “extreme right,” they are either mistaken or deliberately lying. There is a definite reason why the Nazi Party called itself the National Socialist German Workers Party.

The Independent: Hitler and the socialist dream

(h/t: Blazing Cat Fur)

He declared that ‘national socialism was based on Marx’. Socialists have always disowned him. But a new book insists that he was, at heart, a left-winger.

George Watson – Sunday 22 November 1998

In April 1945, when Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in the rubble of Berlin, nobody was much interested in what he had once believed. That was to be expected. War is no time for reflection, and what Hitler had done was so shattering, and so widely known through images of naked bodies piled high in mass graves, that little or no attention could readily be paid to National Socialism as an idea. It was hard to think of it as an idea at all. Hitler, who had once looked a crank or a clown, was exposed as the leader of a gang of thugs, and the world was content to know no more than that.

Half a century on, there is much to be said. Even thuggery can have its reasons, and the materials that have newly appeared, though they may not transform judgement, undoubtedly enrich and deepen it. Confidants of Hitler. such as the late Albert Speer, have published their reminiscences; his wartime table-talk is a book; early revelations like Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks of 1939 have been validated by painstaking research, and the notes of dead Nazis like Otto Wagener have been edited, along with a full text of Goebbels’s diary.

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources. His megalomania, in any case, would have prevented him from calling himself anyone’s disciple. That led to an odd and paradoxical alliance between modern historians and the mind of a dead dictator. Many recent analysts have fastidiously refused to study the mind of Hitler; and they accept, as unquestioningly as many Nazis did in the 1930s, the slogan “Crusade against Marxism” as a summary of his views. An age in which fascism has become a term of abuse is unlikely to analyse it profoundly.

His private conversations, however, though they do not overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism” he once remarked, “as I do not hesitate to admit”. He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch. The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that “they had never even read Marx”, implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been “a private Russian affair”, whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history! His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun”, adding revealingly that “the whole of National Socialism” was based on Marx.

That is a devastating remark and it is blunter than anything in his speeches or in Mein Kampf.; though even in the autobiography he observes that his own doctrine was fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason that it recognised the significance of race – implying, perhaps, that it might otherwise easily look like a derivative. Without race, he went on, National Socialism “would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground”. Marxism was internationalist. The proletariat, as the famous slogan goes, has no fatherland. Hitler had a fatherland, and it was everything to him.

Yet privately, and perhaps even publicly, he conceded that National Socialism was based on Marx. On reflection, it makes consistent sense. The basis of a dogma is not the dogma, much as the foundation of a building is not the building, and in numerous ways National Socialism was based on Marxism. It was a theory of history and not, like liberalism or social democracy, a mere agenda of legislative proposals. And it was a theory of human, not just of German, history, a heady vision that claimed to understand the whole past and future of mankind. Hitler’s discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism. That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in “the community of the volk”, not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to “convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists”, meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.

That realisation was crucial. To dispossess, after all, as the Russian civil war had recently shown, could only mean Germans fighting Germans, and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could be socialism without civil war.

Now that the age of individualism had ended, he told Wagener, the task was to “find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution”. Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route – a long and needlessly painful route – and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had “averaged downwards”; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known. It is plain that Hitler and his associates meant their claim to socialism to be taken seriously; they took it seriously themselves.

For half a century, none the less, Hitler has been portrayed, if not as a conservative – the word is many shades too pale – at least as an extreme instance of the political right. It is doubtful if he or his friends would have recognised the description. His own thoughts gave no prominence to left and right, and he is unlikely to have seen much point in any linear theory of politics. Since he had solved for all time the enigma of history, as he imagined, National Socialism was unique. The elements might be at once diverse and familiar, but the mix was his.

Hitler’s mind, it has often been noticed, was in many ways backward-looking: not medievalising, on the whole, like Victorian socialists such as Ruskin and William Morris, but fascinated by a far remoter past of heroic virtue. It is now widely forgotten that much the same could be said of Marx and Engels.

It is the issue of race, above all, that for half a century has prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist. The proletariat may have no fatherland, as Lenin said. But there were still, in Marx’s view, races that would have to be exterminated. That is a view he published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called “The Hungarian Struggle” in Marx’s journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler. It is now becoming possible to believe that Auschwitz was socialist-inspired. The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism was already giving place to capitalism, which must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left behind after a workers’ revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.
[...]
Much more here.

From YouTube:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by lector0003 on Jan 26, 2012
Probably Douglas Murray’s finest speech delineating the inane moral fetor emanating from Western academicians on the Iranian nuclear crisis (and the hapless Jewish state Europe hates).

More from Douglas Murray here.

By CzechRebel

Back in 1961, Hollywood put together a film to whitewash the eleventh-century legend about Spanish warrior Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (1043 – July 10, 1099), better known as El Cid. Charlton Heston played the role of Díaz, who fights against Muslims and later for Muslims and, still later, is fighting in an army composed of both Christian and Muslim forces. Wrapped up in this strange story is a romance with Sophia Loren playing the leading lady, who is also a Christian.

The theme of the story might be “just give war a chance.” The viewer is bombarded with this message that it scarcely matters who or what you are fighting for, as long as you keep on fighting. Of course, it was not until the late fifteenth century when Spain was finally able to rid itself entirely of Moorish Islamic terrorism. So for another four centuries after El Cid, Spaniards continued to suffer and struggle under the yoke of Muslim tyranny.

From the initial invasion in 711 until the final expulsion of the Muslims in 1492 – 781 years! – Spaniards toiled and bled and died under Islamic rule. The Reconquista was a war to reclaim western civilization from the Dark Ages imposed by Islamic conquest. But the film portrayed the false image that Islam and Christianity were roughly equivalent – merely two sides in a long-ago political and military conflict. That tended to numb whatever sensitivity to the danger of Islamic expansionism that the viewer may have had. Perhaps it even contributed to the foolish mindset of the architects of American foreign policy who think that we can fight on behalf of Muslims sometimes and against Muslims at other times, without letting the Muslims do us any real harm. The West has been doing this since the 1970s and has only gotten burnt in the process.

Not all wars have followed that pattern. World War II could all too easily have gone the other way. It took the Allies only four years to emerge victorious, as opposed to the 400 years it took the Spanish from the time of Rodrigo Díaz to the time of a free Spain. One of the big differences between the so called “War on Terror” and World War II is that the America of the 1940′s took the threat of a fifth column very seriously. The FBI kept a close eye on Germans who might be a bit pro-Nazi long before the war even started. However, there was an even greater threat from Japanese immigrants and even some Japanese-Americans. So more stringent measures had to be taken following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

However, many of those Japanese-Americans were much more American then they were Japanese. A number of them went quietly–if not cheerfully–to internment camps, knowing full well that certain of their seemingly mild-mannered neighbors felt duty-bound to support the Emperor of Japan over any loyalty they might have had to America. But peacefully going into internment was not enough for some Japanese-American patriots!

Many young Japanese-American men volunteered for the American military, most notably the 442nd Infantry Regiment, whose motto was “Go For Broke.” (Other Japanese-American units earned distinction also.) The 442nd became the most highly decorated unit during World War II, taking on some of the most dangerous assignments in Europe and suffering the highest causality rate. 442nd combatants earned over three Purple Hearts on the average per capita. This was in an era when minorities supposedly, in the words of Rodney Dangerfield, “don’t get no respect.” Yes, to this day we hear from the crybabies with their historical revisionist films on how they suffered more and got less credit for winning the war then the “white men.” Well, these guys who physically looked like our Japanese enemies went out and earned their respect in that very era without waiting a few decades for some Hollywood leftist to use their story in one of those manipulative y’all-don’t-love-me-back films.

Oh dear, we may hear from those crybabies who don’t think we appreciate his grandpa’s war effort, so we better address that now. If Hitler had won and his troops had marched down the Main Streets of those little towns where your grandfolks’ family used to live, do y’all really think those Nazis would have given them any more respect? Unless y’all are part of his “Aryan race” it might not have gone so well. For any women who didn’t think they got enough respect, we ask, would the enemy soldier who raped you after winning the war have “respected you in the morning”? Now, if these Japanese-American fellows–the guys who were out winning medals–hadn’t had much luck, had lost the war, and the troops of Hideki Tōjō had come to “liberate” the camps that held their families, those troops’ relatives would have had an excellent chance of surviving the war. For the grandparents of our modern-day crybabies, winning the war was an absolute must. For Japanese-Americans, the US losing the war could have been bad, but probably not fatal.

Time to Choose Sides

Now, to get into the American military at that time, Japanese-Americans faced some probing questions. Most telling was “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power or organization?” Of course, for some, this meant reneging on such a pledge to the Japanese emperor – a pledge that many Japanese-Americans had made before the war.

In view of that, we are proposing that all Muslim members of the American military, and the armies of any nation or faction that seeks US support in the field, be asked the following question: “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and renounce any form of allegiance or obedience to any teaching of Mohammad, any teaching based on the Koran, and the dictates of any Islamic civil or religious leaders that teach violence against the US, Western civilization, or any other Judaeo-Christian civilization?”

To any Muslim who can take the above pledge and mean it, 1389 Blog will give the title “moderate.” To those who consider us too extreme, we say, “Drop the El Cid mentality; we don’t have 400 more years to wait!”

Wondering why 1389 is the monicker for our blog?

Today, we are batting against a rather stealthy jihad. When hijacked airplanes fly into American buildings, we feel the affects of jihad, but we let Muslim clerics explain it away as the work of “extremists.” When a terrorist in the Holy Land explodes a bomb killing himself and a number of people around him, we feel the affects of jihad, but we let the leftists explain that it is Israel’s fault for existing and we let them spout some historical revisionism that a “Palestinian” people are entitled to this land and have some sadistic right to act in this manner. When Islamic dictatorships take (or allow others to take) hostages, we feel the affects of jihad, but we quietly wait for their release. In Muslim countries, Islam and the political system become one and the same. They stone to death those accused of an impure act, behead hostages, persecute and slaughter Christians and Jews, and impose a horrible form of tyranny upon their people. Meanwhile, Islamic movements are hard at work infiltrating Western and non-Muslim societies, all too often aided and abetted by Western governments.

Throughout history, battles between jihadis and non-Muslims were not always so stealthy. Even though communications were slow and not always reliable, the non-Muslims knew the threat and understood what a bleak future lay ahead for those whom fell to Islamic conquest. Battles were fought with swords, arrows and the like. When the Muslims won, the vanquished suffered. When the Muslims lost, the victories peoples thanked God and prepared for the next Islamic attack.

Some of the victims reasoned, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” So, those of weak faith capitulated and converted. This was never an option for staunch Orthodox Christians, for whom Islam was a serious heresy and the work of Satan. If you look a modern map of the world’s religions, you will see that Islam seems to end where Orthodoxy begins and vice versa. You just don’t find too many Lutheran-Muslim borders, Methodist-Muslim borders, or even Roman Catholic-Muslim borders. Indeed, Roman Catholics and Protestants have fought Islam in past centuries; there are a number of locations where Islam clashed with non-Muslim forces that are famous to this day. Our esteemed blog colleagues at Gates of Vienna commemorate a location where Christian forces twice stopped Islamic terrorism. But it has always been Orthodox Christians who have most often fallen under the hammer of Islamic expansionism and have fought against Islam for their very survival.

The Battle

We commemorate a battle fought in 1389 A.D. in Kosovo, the very cradle of Serbian civilization and culture. It was a classic clash between Islamic terrorism and Christianity, and it was a real bloodbath. Both Prince Lazar, the leader of the Christian forces, and Sultan Murad, the leader of the Islamic forces, were killed. All of the high-ranking officers among the Christian forces were killed, as were most of the Muslim leaders.

But who won the Battle of Kosovo? Ironically, the Christian people of the area, the Serbs, consider that they lost the battle! Historians are divided. Many consider it a draw. However, some who study the technicalities of military battles deem that the Christan forces won.

However, one thing is certain: with Sultan Murad dead, the Muslim plans to conquer Eastern Europe were set back for a while. It was 70 years before the Muslims conquered Serbia. By the time that Islamic forces reached Vienna, those Christian forces were ready to fend them off.

Had it not been for the Battle of Kosovo, in 1389 A.D., the Muslims might have captured Central and/or Eastern Europe in the 1400s. Who knows, with several Muslim bases of operation in Central and Eastern Europe, the Reformation may have seen “Protestants” rejecting the Trinity and inserting Allah instead; the Thirty Years’ War may have ended with the Muslims taking charge; and the French Revolution might have been an Islamic takeover.

Note that I referred to Prince Lazar’s forces as Christian. Historical sources tend to refer to his forces as “Serbian.” Many of the Christian forces were not Serbs, in that other kings had sent whole armies to help. However, don’t consider the Serbs “ethnocentric” for calling those troops Serbs. The Serbian people are very inclusive. More than one Serb has called me a fellow “Serb,” sometimes offering and explanation, sometimes not. In the Serbian mindset, a fellow Orthodox Christian, bearing arms against a common foe, would seem like such an equal that I cannot imagine them viewing him as anything less than a countryman.

No, the world might be a bit different today had Murad survived and won that battle back on June 15, 1389. [Note: the date is according to the Julian Calendar then in effect, and still used for liturgical purposes by the Serbian Orthodox Church.] Six centuries on, not much has really changed. The same types of Islamic extremists are fighting the same battle against us today, albeit with different tools, different weapons, different tactics.

In a sense, everyone is either a Jihadi (as much so as Murad’s Turkish terrorists) fighting to impose Sharia law on the world, a bystander who is are more ignorant that innocent, or a “Serb” fighting the forces of the evil of Islamic expansionism. Hence, we are the 1389 blog. And we invite all those who are concerned about Islamic extremism to become Serbs, at least, in spirit.

Links:

• Kosovo (online book by 1389 Blog team member William Dorich)
• What Happened in 1389? – 1389 Blog
• Lazar of Serbia – OrthodoxWiki
• Lazar of Serbia – Wikipedia
• The Battle of Kosovo (Projekat Rastko: Serbian Epic Poems)

From Journey to Orthodoxy:

Posted by Fr. John on November 19, 2011

More and More People in Czechia and Slovakia Are Giving Preference to the Orthodox Church

An interview with Metropolitan Christopher, Archbishop of Prague and Metropolitan of the Czech and Slovakian lands.

Archbishop Christopher of Prague, Metropolitan of the Czech and Slovakian lands talks about the history and modern condition of the Orthodox Church in Czechia and Slovakia. The talk was recorded in June of 2011.

—Your Beatitude, you chose the path of a clergyman of the Orthodox Church during the time in Czechoslovakia after the famous events of 1968 (“Prague Spring”), and for a number of reasons thousands of parishioners were leaving the Orthodox Church. To be Orthodox at that time was at the least, not considered prestigious. What moved you to go against the current?

—Yes, that was when my fate was decided: I chose the Orthodox theological seminary. I have to admit that it was not my cherished dream to become a priest. I wanted to become a forest ranger, and I also wanted very much to paint icons. I studied iconography with Fr. Andrei (Kolomatsky), a very gifted Russian priest, architect, artist, and tireless man of prayer. At times I would try to paint, wanting my icons to be like his—alive. But it didn’t come out like that. I would complain to Fr. Andrei, and he would answer, “Are you praying?” He himself prayed without ceasing, and that was the most important thing I learned from him. I began my spiritual path with him, and I came to know the mighty power of prayer, the strength of Orthodoxy, which enables a man, hoping in God’s help, to overcome what would seem to be insurmountable. I came to know God’s mercy, how the Lord works miracles. Perhaps it was then that I first had the desire to become a priest, albeit not fully consciously.

I went to the seminary only because no other school of higher education would have accepted me. At the time, in order to be accepted at an institute, one had to fill in an application line about one’s agreement to enter the armed forces of the Warsaw convention on my country’s territory. I was not in agreement with violence. Never. When I heard that in the application for admission to the seminary at the Orthodox theological department of Charles University had no such requirement (but there is, as they told me, a more complicated question—on Holy Scripture), I applied there. This is how, by God’s will, I began my path as a clergyman.

—The Church of Czechoslovakia is currently preparing for the sixty-year anniversary of its autocephaly. Why did the Church of Czechoslovakia receive its autocephaly from the Russian Orthodox Church?

—The first contacts, which became the basis of the friendship between our Churches, go back to antiquity, in the tenth–eleventh centuries, when the recluse Procopius, like St. Sergius of Radonezh, founded a monastery in the forest wilderness not far from the Sázava river, which later became a large, famous monastery. During the time that the Sázava Monastery was active, the monks would go to Kiev, and the monks from Kievan Russia would visit the Sázava Monastery. Each time they would bring gifts of icons and manuscripts to each other… These gifts from the Sázava Monastery are still treasured in Kiev. The Kiev monks in their turn brought a piece of the relics of Sts. Boris and Gleb to the Sázava Monastery, where they were honored with great reverence. One of the monastery’s side altars was dedicated to these saints.

In the eighteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church also aided our country’s renewal of our Church. For nearly three centuries, Czechia did not have its own government, and was subject to the Austrian Hapsburg Empire. The people were Germanized, and had no rights. No one in the West wanted or was able to help us. Russia was a light, hope, and refuge for the Czechs at that time. Russian Slavophiles supported the Czech and Slovak patriot-renewers both ideologically and materially. With their help, in 1848 the first Slavic conference was conducted in Prague, which placed a beginning of the renewal in Czechia of Slavic culture and language. In 1867, the Slavic conference took place in Moscow, and on the streets of Prague people were singing, “God save the Tsar!”

Russians helped the Czechs afterward, also. They sent money for the construction of Orthodox Churches, and Orthodox priests. One of these was, for example, the martyr for Orthodoxy and faithfulness to Slavicism Archpriest Nicholai Ryzhkov. The people of Czechia honor that man’s memory. The Czechs also received Russian refugees (during the years of the civil war in Russia and subsequent persecutions) as their own brothers. They helped them to establish themselves, to receive education… The young Czech government spent billions on that.

The first head of the Czechoslovakian government formed in 1918, Karel Kramář, was Orthodox. Together with his wife, Nadezhda Kramář Khludova (a Russian aristocrat), he organized the construction of a remarkable church dedicated to the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos in the Olšany Cemetery, which became a haven for Orthodox Russians, and then during the war years, for Orthodox Czechs, who were earlier under the omophorion of the Holy Hieromartyr Gorazd, the Primate of the Orthodox Church of Czechoslovakia who was executed by the Nazis. The Russian priests, primarily Fr. Andrei (Kolomatsky) and Bishop Sergius of Prague, helped their Czech brothers and sisters in Christ, spiritually cared for them, risking their own lives…

The Russian Orthodox Church did much for the Orthodox in Czechia also after the war. During those years, on the territory of the Czech and Slovak lands their existed four jurisdictions. It was necessary to do away with this atomism of the Orthodox Church and place our reliance in the largest Orthodox Church, the Russian Church. In 1946, the Czech Orthodox Church was accepted into the Moscow Patriarchate. The Russian Orthodox Church sent a talented organizer and missionary to Prague, a most honorable man who suffered much, Bishop Eleutherius. He had a gift of preaching from God, and drew to Orthodox tens, later hundreds of thousands of parishioners.

In 1950 the Church of Czechoslovakia already had a sufficient number of the faithful and bishops to receive independence. It even had a theology school. The Church could support and maintain itself, and needed no support from other sources. On November 23, 1951, a statement was signed in the Moscow Patriarchate granting autocephaly to the Czechoslovakian Orthodox Church. From December 18, 1951, after the notification of the heads of the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches of Czechoslovakia, the Orthodox Church exists as an autocephaly.

—During the 1950′s, the Russian Orthodox Church endured a new round of persecutions (the Khrushchev era). In Czechoslovakia, upper echelons of the Communist Party aided the Orthodox Church in a victory over the Uniates. Is it true that this act of the Communists aided Orthodoxy in Czechia and Slovakia?

—The Communists, both yours (Russian) and ours were always enemies of the Church. That the Czechoslovakian party members supposedly helped the Orthodox Church in Czechoslovakia was only their cunning maneuver: to get rid of the Uniates as quickly as possible with the help of the Orthodox. In fact, the Communist only injured the work of Orthodoxy. They shouted about the victory over the Uniates. In fact, there was no victory, only liquidation. You see, the Unia was introduced into the Slavic lands during the seventeenth century, also by force. Therefore, a large part of the faithful in the Uniate churches, under the influence of Bishop Eleutherius’ sermons, joyfully returned to the bosom of the Church of their ancestors, to Orthodoxy. Undoubtedly, all the rest would have followed their example, with perhaps rare exceptions. But during the process of voluntary departure of parishioners from the Unia—it could be said, at its final stage—the Communist bosses inserted themselves, demanded speedy and total liquidation of the Unia. Their methods are well known: prison, exile…

Then, to the Northern Czech border were sent hundreds of Uniate families. Scores of Uniate priests who did not accept Orthodoxy were defrocked. The Uniate leaders, for example, Bishop Goidich, were held in prison cells, and then sent to a concentration camp designated for particularly dangerous criminals. There Goidich died. Of course, all of this had a negative effect on Orthodoxy. We Orthodox know that no such force is a victory. Goidich became a holy martyr for the Uniates, their standard. Unfortunately, we still have not been victorious over the Unia. They call people to their churches through deception. Those who come to them see Orthodox icons, and thinking that they are being baptized into Orthodoxy, they end up in the Unia…

—What was the real reason for the mass exit of parishioners from the Orthodox Church after the events of 1968?

—The aforementioned was the reason, in any case, the main reason, for the mass exit of parishioners from the Orthodox Church. The arrival of Soviet tanks on our streets completed this process. Orthodoxy was always associated with Russia. And those who invaded our country in tanks spoke Russian. As a sign of protest, our people “forgot” the Russian language. It cost the Primate of the Orthodox Church of Czechoslovakia, Vladyka Doretheus, an enormous effort to save the Church from total disintegration…

—Is it true that at the present time, only the Orthodox Church of the Czech lands and Slovakia is increasing in the number of parishioners, while all other confessions are decreasing? What is the reason for this, in your opinion?

—Yes, this is true. The number of Orthodox in Czechia is growing. Many people have come to us from the former Soviet Union. They want to live here. And they bring their homeland with them—the Orthodox Church. But Czechs are also coming to be baptized into Orthodoxy. Our Church attracts people by the absence of negative phenomena in its history—that is, the inquisition and persecution of those of different convictions. To the contrary, the Orthodox Church is a refuge for all the persecuted. That there are many more Orthodox can be seen: all the Orthodox churches are full. On feast days we even have to serve outdoors, next to the church. Meanwhile, the many Catholic churches are empty; at best, concerts are given in them. The Uniate churches are also not at all full. Less than a tenth of the original number of parishioners (in the 1920′s there were 900,000!) are left in the Hussite Church. Around three million parishioners have left the Catholic Church.

—Why is this happening? Why is Czechia the most atheistic country in Europe?

—People ask me about this often. I then answer by telling the history of my much-suffering country, which joyfully received Baptism from the saintly brothers Cyril and Methodius, but later, after many centuries, suffered persecution from the aggressive (at that time) Roman popes and cardinals… Catholicism was instituted by force, by almost the same methods as fascists or communists used. For disobedience—requisition of property and land, exile from the country, and even execution… “Let every father, mother, and child who does not receive Catholicism in fourteen years be exiled from the country!” Such were the orders from the Pope of Rome after the Catholic League’s victory over the Czechs.

At that time, nearly half of the population of Czechia was exiled. Out of 150,000 families, there remained only 30,000. It is apparently understandable, why Czechs did not like Catholicism. Therefore, as soon as Czechoslovakia became an independent country, nearly a million people left the Catholic Church and created the Czechoslovakian Orthodox Church. And our country would have been Orthodox then, had not, as the Russians say, a mess occurred. Essentially, a tragedy: When the Primate of the newly created Orthodox Church, Holy Hieromartry Gorazd, went to America in order to obtain some needed financial means with the help of wealthy Czechs, another pretender to the bishopric, the talented orator Karel Farsky led nearly all the parishioners into his modernist Church, where Jesus Christ was honored not as the Son of God, but as the First Saint, born of marital union. And people believed him… I think that the name of this modernist Church, called Hussite, worked on people’s psychology. Although, Jan Hus himself was not a modernist, but rather went to be burned at the stake for the sake of Original Church of Christ. As years passed, people have figured everything out. That is the answer to why people leave not only the Catholic Church, but also the Hussite Church.

—Czechia is considered to be the most atheist country. It would seem that without faith, all the vices of society should appear. But in fact Czechia is a peaceful country, people are well-wishing, without aggression. One can be out on the streets without fear at any time of the day or night. Everything in Czechia—the construction of houses, the public transportation, the stores, and other places—is designed to be of maximum convenience for people. I remember how amazed I was at the transfer system of the trains… Everywhere, you feel that in everything having to do with relationships to people there is cordiality, warmth, and kind wisdom… Does this mean that it is possible to do without religion, without faith? What is your opinion on this?

—Yes, our citizens’ peace-loving nature and absence, or more precisely, near absence of aggression, you have correctly noticed. That the majority of the population does not number itself amongst any one of the religious confessions is also true. However, the main mass of our people, the Czechs, cannot be called godless. Take, for example, the Church holidays: Christmas, Christ’s Resurrection, and other great feasts. People try to observe the traditions that have taken root in Czechia since long ago, and which were passed down from generation to generation…

Yes, it is very unfortunate that the majority of our citizens do not attend Church services. But does that mean that we can do without the Church entirely? No, of course not. It is precisely thanks to the Church that our people had the happiness of receiving Christianity originally from the very Equal-to-the-Apostles Cyril and Methodius; in place of barbaric cruelty, they began to cultivate such qualities as love of neighbor, gentleness, and readiness to forgive offenses; loyalty and dedication to family and Fatherland, honor of parents, and all the other virtues. It is precisely thanks to the Church, to our great patriots, such as the first president of Czechoslovakia Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, such as the historian and Russophile František Palacký, who were deeply religious men, that our people acquired Christian morals, a Christian view of life. One could say that this very culture instilled by the Church became the Czechs’ second nature. This can also be seen in the mass pilgrimages to holy places and in part through the reverence for Orthodox saints—Martyr Liudmila, Princess of Czechia, and the Holy Passion-Bearer Prince Václav (Wenceslaus).

Thus, in answer to your question, I would again like to repeat that it is precisely due to the Christian religion, the Church, which was Orthodox in our country from the beginning, our people have the traditions of their fathers, and became the people you know, and the whole world knows—hard working and peace-loving, with God in their hearts. And, of course, the Czechs need the Church.

More and more people in Czechia and Slovakia are giving preference to the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, it is not our task to increase the number of parishioners from for example, former Catholics. Right now it is necessary to unite our efforts to morally strengthen the people, first of all the young people, in order to teach them how to oppose evil, so that, as they say, the sheep would not become goats.

—Will Czechia and Slovakia return to the faith of their fathers, that is, to Orthodoxy? How do you see the future of your Church in the country?

—Return to the original Church of St. Methodius? It is possible. Theoretically. But I don’t normally talk aloud about it. Although I dream of it and pray. I also believe that I am not alone. With the Lord all is possible, and we need to work. After all, the majority of the population is not in the Church. We need to work with them in particular. Our efforts need to be directed against abortions, same sex marriages (although we are against any persecution of such people). We need to explain what the Lord said to us in His commandments: about life, love, friendship, help of neighbor, and about everything good. We need to struggle against evil and violence, against the deception of people…

I am for the one Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Then it will be possible to restore moral values, and raise the peoples’ spirituality. And in this was, is, and always will be the strength of the people and the nation.

—Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague died a martyr’s death for Christ’s truth. Their memory lives on not only in Czechia. Your Beatitude, why have they not been canonized as saints?

—Czechs began to venerate Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague as saints immediately after they were burned at the stake. Jerome of Prague was the first to call Jan Hus a saint—at the very Council of Constance, which condemned Jan Hus and which awaited a “statement of repentance” and condemnation from Jerome of Jan Hus. They were venerated for two hundred years. However, after the defeat by the Catholic Leagues at the fatal battle on White Hill in 1620 and the forced Catholicization of the Czech people, the names of Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague were basically outlawed. In 1918, when Czechoslovakia became an independent state, the modernist Church took the name of Jan Hus. The communists called him something of a revolutionary. In fact, he never called for modernism in his sermons, but spoke only about the undistorted, original teaching of Jesus Christ, which was in fact Orthodoxy.

—Does that mean that Jan Hus’s and Jerome’s martyric deaths could be considered martyrdom for Orthodoxy?

—It was precisely of Orthodoxy that they were accused. This was one of the points of accusation of their heresy. However, they considered themselves Catholics and officially were so. Only at the end of the twentieth century did the Primate of the Roman Catholic Church, John Paul II, express his deep regret over their burning at the stake. But he did not go beyond regret. And they both, Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague, died for the undistorted faith, for the pure faith of Christ—that is, for Orthodoxy. Therefore we are completely justified in canonizing them as saints. This has already been confirmed by the Church of Cyprus and the Greek Church. Other Orthodox Churches also support us.

—Your Beatitude, what are the greatest problems facing your Church right now?

—The greatest problem is the lack of space. Did you see what is going on in the Churches? People can barely squeeze in. Many stand outside. We have nowhere to gather, nowhere to receive pilgrims—and they would come to us. Many people would come from Russia, to the relics of St. Liudmila and St. Wenceslaus; they would come to the place where the first Slavic desert dweller, St. John of Czechia, lived.

—It seems you also had a problem with the Sunday school, and with your office? Were you able to resolve them?

—Yes, there were problems. Big ones. We have a very good Sunday school for children. It is attended by several tens of students. But do you know what the children, parents, and we experienced? The owners of the building (the Czech military offices) refused to extend the lease of the building the school occupied. This is after we, the clergy, and the children’s parents had spent so much time and energy fixing up a building that was given to us in a far from optimal condition. We had even set up a house church for the children, which was beautiful, and the children loved it. They didn’t even let us finish the school year…

We had to finish the Sunday school sessions in the Metropolitan’s office. And it is not so easy to get there…

—Is that your office, Vladyka?

—Yes, it was once, and not only mine. Since 1950 this building served as the Metropolitan’s office of all of my predecessors, the Primates of the our Orthodox Church. However, soon after the refusal to extend the lease of the Sunday school, the owner of the building where the Metropolitan’s office is located also refused to extend the lease. The two refusals coincided like that… So during the new school year, the children had to go from place to place. In part, they used the building of a pre-school.

—And you yourself remained, as they say, without a roof?

—Yes. It was a difficult situation. I am grateful to the Russian Orthodox Church, and in part to His Holiness, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, and also to Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, head of the Department of External Church Relations, and the representative of the Russian Orthodox Church here, Archpriest Nicholai Lischeniuk—they helped us very much. Our Sunday school received a non-terminating lease of the building that housed an exhibition complex. True, only part of it; the rest will come in two years. But the Sunday school is already active there. And do you know what is remarkable? The Sunday school is, by God’s will, very near the new Metropolitan’s office.

—So, that means that the problem with your office was also resolved? Are you also renting?

—We received it as our own property. We purchased it. Again I thank the Russian Orthodox Church, and Patriarch Kirill for his material assistance and support.

—Your Beatitude, how is it going with the parcel of land that the government of Prague promised to give you for the construction of such a needed Orthodox Church of the Czech lands and Slovakia, and a Cathedral church?

—They have been promising for a long time now, ten years. They are always on the verge of placing the last dot. We have already prepared the blueprints for the building. The last time, they asked us to wait for the elections. The mayor’s election has passed… But nothing went forward. They are completely silent. They don’t even promise, but they don’t refuse. We will make it happen. It is a pity—because of insufficient space we are losing potential parishioners. Especially young people, who often out of their ignorance end up in sects. Our space is overfilled, while they (the sectarians) have all they need. So the young, inexperienced people think that God is there, in the sect. But have only an appearance, only talk. Sects in Czechia are strong right now. They have money, buildings…

—Tell us, please, about your prospects for the future. About the most important thing.

—Our prospects are the young people—they are what is most important. Look at the children in the Sunday school, what bright faces they have. What will they become? Engineers, doctors, teachers, and perhaps priests? We do not know. But undoubtedly they will be people who are able to tell right from wrong, to become citizens who live according to the laws of God. And that is the most important thing.

—Finally, one last question concerning the interdependence of Czechs and Russians. You, Your Beatitude, well know what true friendship there was between our peoples. Czechs and Russians have considered each other brothers for many centuries. We loved each other. You also know the reasons for the abrupt cooling, even phobia of the Czechs toward Russians, which, alas, still go on. I know that you for your part try very hard to renew the former friendship. Tell us, please, what specifically do you do in this regard, and what, in your opinion, do Russians need to do in order to make this renewal happen?

—Yes, truly, the friendship between Czechs and Russians continued many centuries. [One testimony of this are the huge number of Liudmilas and Viacheslavs (Wenceslaus) found in Russia. —OC.] The events of August 1968 were especially a blow—the Russian invasion in tanks was taken as a crude disregard for our country’s independence. Czechs are particularly sensitive to that.

A friends’ betrayal is the bitterest betrayal there can be. Czechs were dumbfounded, and “forgot” the Russian language. I remember myself at that time, and I was only fifteen. It was very bitter to recognize that our very best friends, the Russians, had betrayed us.

In August, 1968, on vacation in Hungary, I was arrested for the first time: I had written in Hungarian, “Long live Dubček”. The young Hungarians who told me how to write it in Hungarian gave me away. They were strict about that. They held me and then released me, saying that had I been an adult and Hungarian, I would be sitting in prison for twenty-five years.

—Your Beatitude, you said, “the first time.” Was there a second?

—There was a second time, and a third… The second time was in 1969, after a hockey match between Czechs and Russians, that is the Czechoslovakian team and the Soviet Union’s team. We won, and our boyish heads were spinning. I don’t remember what we did, but we found ourselves in a prison cell. We were again released because we were underage. The third time was when I was twenty-seven. I was getting ready to go to Greece for study. They arrested me due to slander that I wanted to flee the country! In those days, they gave five years for that. Vladyka Dorotheus saved me from prison; he quickly collected the documents and sent me to a monastery in Greece… There I learned Greek and graduated from the university. The slander, of course, was unfair—I never wanted to leave, for I love my country very much…

Well, and as for the “Russian occupation”, I quickly understood that the Russians had nothing to do with it. They did not send Russians to us in tanks, but Soviet Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Uzbeks… And there were also Germans, Hungarians, Poles… Some Russians, too. But I saw the faces of those Russian boys, “invaders”, and they looked the most miserable. From that time on I always said, and still say that the Russians are just like us—sufferers, and Russia, like Czechia, was under oppression, enslaved…

Now many understand this and relations with Russians have changed for the better. I and the Orthodox priests never tire of repeating that the Russians were and are our brothers. I have been consecrating more and more Russian (Ukrainian)-Czech marriages and baptizing the offspring of these unions—infants born from these bonds of love, and bearing within themselves love for both of our peoples and nations.

Source

Translation by OrthoChristian.com

© 2011, Journey To Orthodoxy | The Orthodox Christian ‘Welcome Home’ Network for Converts. All rights reserved. On republishing this, please provide a link to the original post. Thank you and may God richly bless you.

Read more: Jan Hus, Jerome of Prague and Orthodoxy in Czechia & Slovakia : Journey To Orthodoxy | The Orthodox Christian ‘Welcome Home’ Network for Converts

Also see:

• Never Knew that the Church was Orthodox

Gates of Vienna has the story.

…Yet, based on the analogy with the Roman Empire, the collapse of the current order does not portend the end of the world. As Fjordman points out, it simply means the end of the world as we know it….

This may be the most important video you will see all year.

From Answering Muslims:

Click here to view the embedded video.

[YouTube link]
Uploaded by Acts17Apologetics on Jan 1, 2012
Please visit: http://www.answeringmuslims.com/p/jihad.html

For more on the stages of Jihad, see:

• Sam Shamoun, “Is Islam a Religion of Peace?”
• Rev. Richard P. Bailey, “Jihad: The Teaching of Islam from Its Primary Sources”
• Shaykh Ibn Humaid, “Jihad in the Qur’an and Sunnah”

Pamphlet PDF here: Read, print, pass along, email!

#AllAmericanMuslim and the Four Stages of Jihad

David Wood @ AnsweringMuslims - “Islam’s greatest ally in the west is ignorance. Jihadists can’t subjugate us thru physical force, so they are doing their best to subjugate our minds. The ultimate obstacle to global jihad then, is an informed population of free people.”

In his latest video David clearly maps out the four stages of jihad in islam.

• Stage One: Stealth Jihad.
• Stage Two: Defensive Jihad.
• Stage Three: Offensive Jihad.

Four? Yes, four, a la the #AllAmericanMuslim. How many times has it been asked – where are the Muslims with regard to islamist terrorists? The answer is – going about their lives, heads in the sand – right where everyone else is who is not paying attention and educating themselves to the daily escalation of sharia law and the islamization of the west.

David Wood – “I think it is important to add a quick appendix on westernized Muslims. I’ve said in this video that Muslims in stage one are commanded to deceive non Muslims in order to keep us ignorant of islams violent goals. But if you present this information to your Muslim friends they are going to deny it. Now. Does this mean they are practicing taqiyah? No. When your Muslim friends tell you that Islam is a religion of peace, are they trying to trick you? Probably not.

Most Muslims in America have been influenced by western values more than they have been influenced by Islam. They may pray five times a day or fast during Ramadan but their knowledge of islam doesn’t get much deeper than that. They’ve read very little of what’s in their sources and they know practically nothing about what we’ve discussed in this video.

So chances are when your Muslim friends tell you that islam is peaceful they really believe it, no need to accuse them of lying. Sadly your westernized Muslim friends aren’t a source of islamic doctrine. islamic doctrine is grounded in the koran and the sunnah of mohammad and these sources are perfectly clear when it comes to jihad. So i think we need to add another stage to our three stages. Stage zero: The totally clueless about jihad stage.”

Despite all the criticism and controversy, I believe we will end up thanking #AllAmericanMuslim. It has begun. Conversations are beginning to be had. Solutions to be looked for. The time is now to #WakeUpAmerica – ALL America.

Ron Paul’s 9/11 Insanity: Why Ron Paul Is the Jeremiah Wright of the Right

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by Pajamasmedia on Dec 21, 2011

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) is surging in the polls, but that doesn’t prevent Zo from telling you why he isn’t supporting this Texas congressman’s presidential bid. Hear more.

One minor quibble: we at 1389 Blog believe that rescinding Roe v. Wade and giving control over abortion back to the States would be a good step toward rolling back abortion throughout the US. That said, Ron Paul doesn’t seem to want to alienate his libertarian (or perhaps libertine) base by unequivocally coming out against abortion.

More at 2.0: The Blogmocracy.

Please go here and read the article.

Also, please read the comments.

Washington Times: Letter to the Editor

Jeffrey Kuhner is to be commended for accurately describing the “Nazi regime led by the odious Ante Pavelic and his sadistic Ustashes” which “systematically killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies (Roma) and anti-fascist Croatians” (“Myth of Croatian fascism,” Commentary, Nov. 25). However, Mr. Kuhner’s attempt to convince us that present-day Croatia’s connection to the fascist Ustashe of World War II is just a myth lacks credibility.

It is no myth that Croatians greeted German troops with their right arms raised in a Nazi salute as they chanted “Heil Hitler,” as reported in The Washington Times in 1997. According to a story of that year, “Mobs chased minorities from their homes, kicking them and pelting them with eggs as they fled into the woods. Europe in the 1940? No, Croatia in the 1990s.”

Around the same time, Newsweek reported that when German tanks passed through Croatia as part of the NATO deployment to the Balkans, “Croatians greeted the Germans with the straight-armed fascist salute,” an expression of solidarity dating back to the alliance between Croatian fascists and the Nazis.

Croatia is once again flying the same fascist checkerboard flag that it flew in 1941, when Hitler recognized Croatia as an independent nation for being his loyal ally. Ironically, the map of the Balkans drawn by Hitler in 1942 is almost identical to today’s map of the Balkans created by NATO.

As A.M. Rosenthal wrote in “Back From the Grave” in the New York Times on April 15, 1997: “In World War II, Hitler had no executioner more willing, no ally more passionate, than the Fascists of Croatia. They are returning, 50 years later, from what should have been their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Western allies who dug that grave with the bodies of their servicemen have the power to stop them, but do not.”

No more brutal and graphic evidence that Croatia’s Nazi past is alive and well was the Croatian army’s Operation Storm in 1995, when more than 200,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from the Krajina region of Croatia. Thousands of Serbs who did not flee, mostly elderly men and women, were exterminated in true Nazi fashion.

Mr. Kuhner attempts to sweep under the rug modern-day Croatia’s fascist propensities but this degrades the Serbs, our World War II allies.

STELLA L. JATRAS

Camp Hill, Pa.

My original letter:

Regarding his article, “Myth of Croatian fascism,” Jeffery Kuhner is to be commended for accurately describing the “Nazi regime [in WWII Croatia] led by the odious Ante Pavelic and his sadistic Ustashes” which “systematically killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies (Roma) and anti-fascist Croatians.” However his attempt to convince us that present-day Croatia’s roots to the fascist Ustashe of World War II is just a myth lacks credibility.

It is no myth that Croatians greeted German troops with their right arms raised in a Nazi salute as they chanted “Heil Hitler,” as reported in The Washington Times in 1997. The Times continued, “Mobs chased minorities from their homes, kicking them and pelting them with eggs as they flee into the woods. Europe in the 1940? No, Croatia in the 1990s.” (edited)

Newsweek, 1996/1997, reported that when German tanks passed through Croatia as part of the NATO deployment to the Balkans, “Croatians greeted the Germans with the straight-armed fascist salute.”, an expression of solidarity dating back to the alliance between Croatian fascist and the Nazis. Croatia is once again flying the same fascist checkerboard flag that it flew in 1941, when Hitler recognized Croatia as an Independent nation for being his loyal ally. Ironically, the map of the Balkans drawn by Hitler in 1942 is almost identical to today’s map of the Balkans created by NATO. (edited)

The following is from A.M. Rosenthal’s “Back From the Grave,” (NYT, 15 April 1997) “In World War II, Hitler had no executioner more willing, no ally more passionate, than the Fascists of Croatia. They are returning, 50 years later, from what should have been their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Western allies who dug that grave with the bodies of their servicemen have the power to stop them, but do not.”

No more brutal and graphic evidence that Croatia’s Nazi past is alive and well is the Croatian Army’s Operation Storm in 1995 when over 200,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from the Krajina region of Croatia. Thousands of Serbs who did not flee, mostly elderly men and women, were exterminated in true Nazi fashion.

Jeffrey Kuhner should stop using the Washington Times as his forum to ameliorate today’s Croatia’s fascist propensities and should stop humiliating and degrading the Serbian people, our ally who rescued over 500 downed American airmen who had been shot down over Yugoslavia during World War II while Croatians turned the ones they captured over to the Nazis for execution.

Stella

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/24/myth-of-croatian-fascism/
KUHNER: Myth of Croatian fascism

Michael Coren & Rabbi Kaplan: all things Hannukah

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by SDAMatt2a on Dec 21, 2011
Rabbi Kaplan explains the miracle of Hannukah to Michael Coren.

Bare Naked Islam has the story:

BNI has posted many stories that show the United States and Nato forces fought on the wrong side of that war. Here is an essay, never before published, about the tragedy of that decision with its unforgivable betrayal of a long-time ally, the Serbs, in favor of the Muslim invaders who were doing what they do all over the world, replacing the indigenous population with an Islamic republic, all the while crying that they were the victims of ethnic cleansing.

View or download the PDF here:

The Origins of Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: The Untold Story
By Zhivko B. Damyanovich

Podcasts

• Bosch Fawstin did a follow-up on this article on the podcast “Don’t Let it Go….Unheard”. The segment starts at 31 minutes in and lasts for about a half hour.
• He will also appear on The Jamie Glazov Show Tuesday, Dec. 6 at 8-9pm Pacific time. Try to listen in live.

From FrontPage Magazine:

By Bosch Fawstin December 2, 2011 @ 12:38 am

My name is Bosch and I’m a recovering Muslim.

That is, if Muslims don’t kill me for leaving Islam, which it requires them to do. That’s just one of the reasons I’ve been writing and drawing against Islam and its Jihad for a number of years now. But fortunately for us, Islam hasn’t been able to make every Muslim its slave, just as Nazism wasn’t able to turn every German into a Nazi. So there is Islam and there are Muslims. Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don’t aren’t.

But that doesn’t mean we should consider these reluctant Muslims allies against Jihad. I’ve been around Muslims my entire life and most of them truly don’t care about Islam. The problem I have with many of these essentially non-Muslim Muslims, especially in the middle of this war being waged on us by their more consistent co-religionists, is that they give the enemy cover. They force us to play a game of Muslim Roulette since we can’t tell which Muslim is going to blow himself up until he does. And their indifference about the evil being committed in the name of their religion is a big reason why their reputation is where it is.

So while I understand that most Muslims are not at war with us, they’ve proven in their silence and inaction against jihad that they’re not on our side either, and there’s nothing we can say or do to change that. We just have to finally accept it and stop expecting them to come around, while doing our best to kill those who are trying to kill us.

Another problem with Muslims who aren’t very Muslim is that they lead some among us to conclude that they must be practicing a more enlightened form of Islam. They’re not. They’re “practicing” life in non-Muslim countries, where they are free to live as they choose. But their “Islam” is not the Islam. There’s no separate ideology apart from Islam that’s being practiced by these Muslims in name only, there’s no such thing as “Western Islam”.

Non-observant Muslims are not our problem, but neither are they the solution to our problem. Our problem is Islam and its most consistent practitioners. There is nothing in Islam that stays the hand of Muslims who want to kill non-Muslims. If an individual Muslim is personally peaceful, it’s not because of Islam, it’s because of his individual choice, which is why I often say that your average Muslim is morally superior to Mohammad, to their own religion. The very rare Muslim who helps us against Jihad is acting against his religion, but that doesn’t stop some among us from thinking that his existence somehow means that he represents more than himself.

The only reason we’re talking about Islam is because it doesn’t mean peace. Islam wasn’t hijacked by a “small minority of extremists” on 9/11, it was hijacked by a very small minority of moderates whose embarrassment in being associated with such an immoderate religion leads them to engage in moderate truth telling about it, proving their irrelevance as allies.

In addition to these politically active moderates, when you see well-assimilated Muslims in the West, you’re not seeing Islam in action, you’re seeing individuals living up to the old adage, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. They’re essentially post-Islamic Muslims who have rejected Islamic values and have embraced Western ones. But since the process of their assimilation was implicit – as it happened naturally by their exposure to Western, i.e., pro-life, values – both Muslims and non-Muslims alike prefer to generously give Islam some credit for it. But a good Muslim, by our standards is a bad Muslim by Islamic standards. Objectively good human beings, who identify themselves as Muslim, give Islam a good face, one far better then it deserves. This only gives us a false impression about what it is we’re facing, with just another excuse not to face it. And this leads to our acceptance into our culture of stealth jihadists who have figured out how to say what we want to hear, while they scheme behind the scenes to further Islamize the West.

In the name of distinguishing the enemy from Muslims who mean us no harm, far too many Western commentators have avoided using the name “Islam” for the enemy’s ideology, and instead have decided to create their very own terms for the threat we’re facing, terms that are alien to the enemy. Terms such as:

Islamic Fundamentalism.

Islamic Extremism.

Totalitarian Islam.

Islamofascism.

Islamonazism.

Political Islam.

Bin Ladenism.

Radical Islam.

Militant Islam.

Islamism.

Jihadism.

We didn’t use terms such as “Radical Nazism”, “Extremist Shinto” and “Militant Communism” in the past. “Militant Islam”, Political Islam”, etc., are redundant terms. Our pretending otherwise has proven disastrous. Thousands of American lives, both civilian and military, have been sacrificed because of policies predicated on the myth that “Islam means peace.” We didn’t try to reform Shinto or Nazism during World War II; the major changes in those cultures took place only after we thoroughly de-militarized them.

And it’s no accident that Western analysts of Islam who are most informed about Islam are also most critical of it, while those least informed are least critical. But then there are those who, in their study of Islam, have become so enamored with their subject that, instead of sticking to what Islam is, they often write about what it isn’t, what they hope it might be. They seem preoccupied with doing their part to save Islam from those who have allegedly corrupted it.

The Muslim world is where the true meaning of Islam can be found in practice. Islam – not any alleged deviant form of it – means misogyny, censorship, anti-Semitism, homophobia, wife-beatings, beheadings, honor killings, pedophilia/“child marriages”, murdering infidels, etc. This is evil, and Islam sanctions every bit of it, but we’ve been told that we must respect “one of the world’s great religions” because it’s a religion. Following 9/11, the only thing George W. Bush knew about Islam was that it was a religion, and that apparently was a good enough reason for him to exonerate it as he did. And his advisor on Islam, David Forte, told Bush exactly what he wanted to hear, that “Nothing this evil could come from religion.” But 9/11 did come from a religion. Whatever else 9/11 was, it was an act of faith.

And Bush saying “Islam is peace” shortly after 9/11 gave the enemy a gift they couldn’t have foreseen. Here was the one man who was charged to defend America from their attack and here he was defending the very ideology that motivated the attackers. Honesty is the best policy in general, and when it comes to war, it’s a moral imperative to find out the truth, to tell the truth and to act on the truth, no matter what sacred cow is killed in the process. And so a big part of why nearly 3,000 victims of jihad on 9/11 haven’t been avenged is because of respect for religion, even for a religion that calls for our destruction.

Muslims who really care about Islam are part of an organized effort to spread Islam, and I sometimes refer to this collective effort by Muslims as “Organized Islam.” No matter the means involved, Muslims working towards a more Islamic world want the same thing the jihadists want. This organized effort includes Mosques, Muslim organizations, Muslim individuals writing books, blog posts, etc. And they all invariably engage in anti-Western, Anti-Israeli propaganda, at the very least.

I often hear that we should be working with the Muslim world. Working towards what? As Ayn Rand writes, “In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.” Any time we spend “working” with a culture that calls for our destruction, we are working towards our own destruction, consciously or not.

While it’s true that jihadists don’t represent most Muslims, they do represent Islam. But then why don’t most Muslims engage in jihad? Like in any culture, heroes are a small minority, and that goes for Islamic culture as well. The jihadists are Islam’s heroes; they are the ones most dedicated to following Allah’s commands and they’re celebrated in the Muslim world for it. They are also the only ones to whom Islam guarantees paradise. And their rarity was made even clearer when we learned that only the pilots of 9/11 knew it was a suicide mission. Our enemy knows that it’s tough to get even hardcore Muslims to sacrifice their lives for Islam, but they don’t want us to know that. Just as they don’t want us to know that behind their boast that they love death is the fact that they hate life.

And while Muslims who blow themselves up in order to kill non-Muslims are a small minority, Muslims who would explicitly condemn them are an even smaller minority. And while I think that Muslims are mere sheep to their Jihadist wolves, there are also too many Muslim cheerleaders for jihad. How many Muslims celebrated 9/11? Far too many. Even in my own lax Muslim upbringing in America, there was an omnipresent anti-Semitism and misogyny. Some members of my family admired Adolph Hitler, who I refer to as “Islam’s Favorite Infidel.” Regarding misogyny, the birth of a girl became a day of mourning for Muslim women in my family; they understood the suffering this girl would endure under Islam, even in America.

Though we say we’ve been at war for over ten years, we haven’t even begun to fight the war the way we should be fighting it. And those calling for a change within Islam during this war would be surprised at how much Islam can be changed through an honest war on our behalf. You can’t make a violent religion like Islam non-violent by argument, only by greater retaliatory force against state sponsors of jihad terrorism.

The future of Islam and the well-being of Muslims is said to be of importance to us. Post – 9/11, the defense of our culture, our values, our very lives has been optional, but our defense of Islam has been absolute. It began with Bush’s “Islam is peace” and it continues with Obama, who said in his Submission Speech in Egypt in 2009, in front of members of The Muslim Brotherhood, “I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” If only he felt the same about America.

We can’t be both for Islam and for ourselves. This enemy is fully on their own side and fully against us and they’ve made themselves believe that they’re the good guys and that we’re the bad guys, and our actions have done nothing but turn their hatred of us into an ever-deepening contempt. Before we see the enemy for what it is, we need to see ourselves for what we are. Only then can we, with full moral conviction, make them pay for what they’ve done and move us towards victory.

Our problem is not “Islamophobia”, but Islamophilia. It is this uncritical, uninformed, absolute defense of Islam by Western elites after 9/11 that I refer to as Islamgate. It’s a scandal for the ages that few involved would ever admit to being part of.

I care about the truth. I care about Western Civilization. I care about myself, my loved ones and my friends. I care about Iife. And that’s why I don’t care about Islam.

Our altruistic concern for the future and well being of the Muslim world has come at the expense of American lives and treasure. We’ve placed the well being of “The Muslim World” above our own self-defense. We’ve placed today’s Big Lie, “Islam means peace”, above the truth we need to act on. We’ve placed the lives of Muslim civilians above the lives of our soldiers, placing them in absolutely unnecessary danger in order to protect innocent (or even guilty) civilians. Our Rules of Engagement might as well be renamed the Golden Rules of Engagement, as our soldiers have been forced to treat the enemy the way we’d like to be treated. And the enemy takes full advantage of that, as they do of all of the policies our morally vain politicians have concocted. We need to shift the focus onto our own well-being at the enemy’s expense for a change.

We’ve tried everything since 9/11 except real war. War is the answer to Jihad.

So who cares about Islam? Muslims, Jihadists, Islamophiles, Leftists who naturally side with anti-American ideologies, guilt-ridden fellow travelers who think America is usually in the wrong, and religionists who believe any religion is better than none. But since Leftists and Islamophiles usually know very little about Islam, who truly cares about Islam? Those who are at war with us.

In the end, I care about Islam and the Muslim world as much as the Muslim world cares about America and the West. This is war. We can’t be on both sides. I’m not rooting for Islam or the Muslim world.

I’m rooting for us.

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Bosch Fawstin is an Eisner Award nominated cartoonist currently working on a graphic novel, The Infidel, of which the first chapter is now available as a digital comic. Bosch’s first graphic novel is Table for One. He is also the author of ProPiganda: Drawing the Line Against Jihad, a companion to The Infidel, and the 1st print appearance of Pigman.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

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]]> http://1389blog.com/2011/12/06/non-muslim-muslims-and-the-jihad-against-the-west/feed/ 0 http://1389blog.com/2011/11/28/heroes-of-the-counterjihad-battle-of-talas-751-ad/ http://1389blog.com/2011/11/28/heroes-of-the-counterjihad-battle-of-talas-751-ad/#comments Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:11:48 +0000 1389 http://1389blog.com/?p=12486

Present-day Kyrgyzstan, with approximate location of Battle of Talas

Islam’s China Wars-751 A.D-Battle of Talas

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by anu123km on Nov 19, 2011

No Islam, No Sharia
Nowhere Nowhere,
F*** Islamofascism

ISLAM IS FASCISM

One should read of genocide of Hindus,Buddhists and Sikhs at the hands of Muslims… as they were not protected people according to fascist book-Quran.It will help to counter the Islamic propaganda that Islam is peaceful and only retaliates when west attacks it be it crusades or today (a lie ofcourse). Hindu and Buddhist India was attacked unprovoked and more than 80 millions were killed during 11th-14th century according to conservative estimates.

Also see:

• About.com: Battle of Talas River
• Saudi Aramco World: The Battle of Talas
• Wikipedia: Battle of Talas
• China: A History of Warfare – Battle of Talas River – Redux
• What happened in 1389?

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]]> http://1389blog.com/2011/11/28/heroes-of-the-counterjihad-battle-of-talas-751-ad/feed/ 4 http://1389blog.com/2011/11/27/tears-of-jihad-ever-wondered-how-many-people-have-died-as-a-result-of-jihad/ http://1389blog.com/2011/11/27/tears-of-jihad-ever-wondered-how-many-people-have-died-as-a-result-of-jihad/#comments Sun, 27 Nov 2011 06:55:21 +0000 Gramfan http://1389blog.com/?p=12430

And people think this is a relatively new occurrence. Not if you go back in history.

Bill Warner has the details.

Estimated 270 million killed by Jihad and counting.

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jihad. These figures are a rough estimate of the death of non-Muslims by the political act of jihad.

Africa

Thomas Sowell [Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture, BasicBooks, 1994, p. 188] estimates that 11 million slaves were shipped across the Atlantic and 14 million were sent to the Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East. For every slave captured many others died. Estimates of this collateral damage vary. The renowned missionary David Livingstone estimated that for every slave who reached a plantation, five others were killed in the initial raid or died of illness and privation on the forced march.[Woman’s Presbyterian Board of Missions, David Livingstone, p. 62, 1888] Those who were left behind were the very young, the weak, the sick and the old. These soon died since the main providers had been killed or enslaved. So, for 25 million slaves delivered to the market, we have an estimated death of about 120 million people. Islam ran the wholesale slave trade in Africa.

120 million Africans

Christians

The number of Christians martyred by Islam is 9 million [David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Trends AD 30-AD 2200, William Carey Library, 2001, p. 230, table 4-10] . A rough estimate by Raphael Moore in History of Asia Minor is that another 50 million died in wars by jihad. So counting the million African Christians killed in the 20th century we have:

60 million Christians

Hindus

Koenard Elst in Negationism in India gives an estimate of 80 million Hindus killed in the total jihad against India. [Koenard Elst, Negationism in India, Voice of India, New Delhi, 2002, pg. 34.] The country of India today is only half the size of ancient India, due to jihad. The mountains near India are called the Hindu Kush, meaning the “funeral pyre of the Hindus.”

80 million Hindus

Buddhists

Buddhists do not keep up with the history of war. Keep in mind that in jihad only Christians and Jews were allowed to survive as dhimmis (servants to Islam); everyone else had to convert or die. Jihad killed the Buddhists in Turkey, Afghanistan, along the Silk Route, and in India. The total is roughly 10 million. [David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson,World Christian Trends AD 30-AD 2200, William Carey Library, 2001, p. 230, table 4-1.]

10 million Buddhists

Jews

Oddly enough there were not enough Jews killed in jihad to significantly affect the totals of the Great Annihilation. The jihad in Arabia was 100 percent effective, but the numbers were in the thousands, not millions. After that, the Jews submitted and became the dhimmis (servants and second class citizens) of Islam and did not have geographic political power.

This gives a rough estimate of 270 million killed by Jihad.

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Bill Warner is the director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam. This article appeared in politicalislam.com blog.

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