Where We're Headed (Warning: Liable to Cause Nightmares)

If you want to have a nice day, don't watch this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzjjwCxeJvg

Culture Wars, Corbyn, & Cardinal Pell

"It's not a miracle. It's justice." That was how "Australia's Dreyfus", Cardinal George Pell, reportedly corrected a well-meaning prison guard on the morning of 7 April, when, after spending 13 months on jail for preposterous alleged historic sex crimes against two 13-year-old choirboys, the cardinal's conviction was overturned by the unanimous judgment of the full bench of Australia's High Court, 7:0.  As is well-known, the cardinal had been convicted on the accusation of a single accuser, with no corroborating evidence whatsover, and despite the countervailing testimony of defence witnesses. 

The High Court's decision was a stinging rebuke for the two Victorian Supreme Court justices who last August rejected Pell's Appeal to have his December 2018 conviction quashed, and a ringing endorsement of the careful analytical judgment of the third Supreme Court judge, Justice Mark Weinberg, who had shown good reason why the conviction was unsafe. Weinberg, a brilliant legal mind with an impressive curriculum vitae, was the only one of the three Supreme Court judges with expertise in criminal law.

A conservative cleric: Herald Sun, 13 February1997

Although the Pell Case has often been compared to that of Alfred Dreyfus, in so far as two innocent men were robbed of their liberty and reputation on trumped up charges, their principal persecutors markedly differ, the conservative Pell's being overwhemingly men and women of the left and far left, often atheistic and militantly secular, as well as in many cases being hostile to Israel. Many embody the mindset, seen in an odiously inappropriate tweet on the day of Pell's release from jail by Victoria's state premier Dan Andrews, as well as in comments by the extreme feminista Twitterati, that the accuser in sexual assault crimes must always be believed.  (Although, the hypocrisy of the left being ever-present, that mindset does not apply in the case of a former Australian Labor Party leader accused by a young woman of rape.  Same regarding Joe Biden.)

To their shame, some lefty Jewish acquaintances of mine have joined in the foaming-at-the-mouth demonisation of Pell (that continues from leftist sources since his release) with such social media statements as "We all know he did it" (imagine what these libellous folk would say had they been around to witness such prejudiced comments about the exonerated Mendel Beilis) and with ill-informed claptrap, reminiscent of dark antisemitic tropes about the global power of the Rothschild Bank, declaring as fact that the financial power of the Vatican secured Pell's release (in fact, he received no church funds whatsoever to finance his defence).

Ballarat Courier, 4 June 2002

The principal villains in the decades-long persecution of Cardinal Pell (who since his release has quite rightly deplored the "guilt by accusation" mindset that underlay his case and threatens to underlie others if not discarded) is the ABC (taxpayer-funded, left-dominated, and habitually flouting its obligation to present news and analysis in a fair and balanced way), which has engaged in a scandalous campaign of "vigilante journalism" against him,  led by reporter Louise Milligan, whose book Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell anticipated his "fall" long before his trial and incarceration and is apparently riddled with errors, with a supporting case of ABC personnel too numerous to mention here.  They and their leftist pals in the Fairfax media and the independent Guardian Australia are still at it, since his release, exulting in the highly unfair findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse that had been redacted until now [document here]  and pushing calls that he be defrocked. (On that unfairness, see, for instance, NewsCorp and Sky News journalist Andrew Bolt's interview with Peter Westmore here and Gerard Henderson's article here) Also in the vanguard of the anti-Pell crusade that saw the cardinal charged with the offences of which he has since been acquitted was the politically contaminated leadership of the police force in the state of Victoria, which, in what was effectively a Get Pell exercise, touted for complaints against him. (Incidentally, to see how low the anti-Pell forces have been capable of stooping, see this ABC report.)

The  interview which Cardinal Pell gave, days after his release, to one of his staunchest supporters, Andrew Bolt, discusses these sinister issues, and there are many more reports and videos online that do, one of the most interesting being this interview on the day of the release with Chris Merritt, legal affairs editor of The Australian newspaper.  There's also this, Gerard Henderson of the Sydney Institute talking to Andrew Bolt at the end of April. And be sure to have a look at Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Professor Greg Craven's tongue-lashing of the so-called national broadcaster, on 7 April

Like their counterparts on the BBC, ABC journalists are a self-congratulatory nose-thumbing lot, who seem to forget that public funds pay their salaries. The nauseating tweet at right, a paeon of praise to her boss, which came amid a veritable frenzy of Pell-bashing tweets by Ms Milligan following the 7 April High Court verdict, is a case in point: in Aussie-speak it can best be described as "brown nosing", and one of the co-presenters of ABC's breakfast news show gets into the act.  Odiously, and arrogantly, the ABC (like the BBC) handles complaints about itself in-house, and one result was Paul Barry's contemptuously conceived and delivered riposte to its critics concerning the Pell Case, as excoriated here by Andrew Bolt. To quote briefly from Bolt's column in the Melbourne Herald-Sun of 11 April denouncing the ABC's "stunning denialism" (ABC Denies its Pell Witchhunt, Then Proves It):

Can anyone believe the ABC's claim that it didn't vilify the innocent George Pell and help hound him into jail? The ABC should be ashamed, humiliated, repentant and begging for forgiveness for its starring role in the vilification, destruction and jailing of an innocent man.... Not one single ABC presenter or reporter at any time pointed out that the many allegations the ABC aired against Pell were inherently implausible - in fact, some impossible. Not one. ABC staff instead routinely treated them as not just credible, but often true.In fact, the ABC united behind ABC reporter Louise Milligan as she peddled allegations against Pell that were so weak that every one of them - like the ones she devoted an entire 7.30 report to - was either dropped by prosecutors or now overturned by the High Court. But not before Pell spent 405 days in jail....'

One of the bloggers and journalists who has done laudable service in the cause of showing that Pell could not have committed the heinous crimes for which he was convicted is Dr Chris Friel.  No rightwinger, he. In a very recent piece that highlights the anti-Pell tweets of a certain unidentifiable person called Lyndsay Farlow and which demonstrates the ABC's despicable role in Pell's persecution, Dr Friel explains that before he became interested in securing justice for Pell he investigated the role of pro-Israel "hawks" in casting Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite.  A footnote to his article claims:

'This mirrors the antisemitism crisis in which a significant minority of Corbyn supporters are Jewish (and who are therefore deemed anti-Semitic!) a fact that the mainstream have difficulty acknowledging."

 Inter alia, in the main text:

 'Let's now turn to the ABC. The organisation would no doubt espouse values of fairness to all including Catholics, and aspire to treat controversial topics such as sex abuse and redress even-handedly. Insofar as my analysis of Farlow would be accepted, I am sure that the ABC would repudiate the idea that Farlow's concerns are that of the state broadcaster. Even if Farlow "hunts witches" the ABC does not.

Here it may be worth offering a general description of the likes of Farlow (or CLAN), namely, that they are "hawkish." A typical hawk is both polarised and polarising. Hawks will have a particular, single focus and view everything through that lens. They will then divide the world into friends and enemies accordingly, sometimes mirroring the equal and opposite pole.

The example that I spent a year studying in fine detail before I ever wrote on Pell was the "grass roots Zionist hawks" that agitate for Israel having a special concern to ward off the threat of boycotts. No doubt pro-Palestinian pressure groups exist that mirror such hawks, but from my experience it is the pro-Israel faction that is especially well-funded and organised. Although quasi-autonomous from the state of Israel, such groups will be well briefed (winning the information war is compared to winning the skies in military warfare) and also (covertly) funded by Israel as indicated by the exposure of Shai Masot delivering £1,000,000 to Joan Ryan MP to discredit her leader Jeremy Corbyn. It was my impression that the shrill, unreasonable, and abusive "group-think" ("group speech"?) of the redress-for-abuse hawks was astonishingly similar to the pro-Israel-anti-boycotts hawks.

Now, just as the BBC would officially distance itself from the pro-Israel hawks, in reality they and the mainstream tend to treat them uncritically, not least because the hawks can and do provide kompromat. In the case of Jeremy Corbyn, an MP on the fringes who was surprisingly victorious in the 2015 Labour leadership (after changes to the voting system that gave power to his grass roots), it was the hawks who had already been collecting information on him regarding his Palestinian Rights activity since 2010 well before he was prominent that supplied the data to the mainstream. This was then distorted and reproduced amidst artificial hysteria at a time of acute tension in Israel and after Corbyn had done surprisingly well in the 2017 election and might well progress further.

In other words, the hawks act like a "ginger group." Their aim is always to "ginger up" (agitate, enliven, stimulate) the mainstream. To repeat, hawks are not merely polarised but they are polarising, agitating to normalise an extreme agenda. I would argue that this is what we see with Pell and the Australian mainstream.

In the case of the ABC, with reporter Louise Milligan especially, it seems that the hawks have infiltrated the state broadcaster, something that was no doubt made easy given that many in the ABC loathe Pell's Conservative social values (on gender issues such as abortion and gay rights, but also climate change).' [Footnote numbers in original have been omitted here]

While praising Dr Friel for his support of the cardinal, I can't but regret Dr Friel's comments about Corbyn and Zionists.  I mean, "Zionist hawks" have infiltrated the BBC? Seriously?!

The ABC and the BBC are very much birds of a feather. 

In the interview that he gave to Andrew Bolt on 14 April, Cardinal Pell quite justifiably observed that "the culture wars are real".  He cited the determination that the militant left has to divest western civilisation of the Judeo-Christian foundations on which it rests.

He is quite correct of course. And complicit in this determination are leftists who infest the news rooms of both ABC and BBC, as well as sections of academia.

As Pell's longtime friend, the distinguished American Catholic scholar Dr George Weigel has remarked, in his capacity as a member of the Friends of Israel Initiative,

 ".... Israel, which has a clear right to self-defense, is beset today by a unique combination of threats: it must defend its people from attack while defending its very right to exist. No other state in the world faces this dual challenge. To deny Israel’s right to confront some of the world’s most vicious terrorist groups in order to ensure the safety of its citizens is to corrode international norms from within”a process that is already well-advanced at the United Nations, to that organization’s shame.

The assault on Israel is one part of a more general assault on the West, on democracy, and on the moral and culture heritage that grew from the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. One especially threatening part of this assault is the effort to use human rights claims and claims of universal criminal jurisdiction as weapons against Israeli democracy. Should these efforts succeed, similar efforts will certainly be turned against other western democracies.

Peace in the Middle East, to which all of us are firmly committed, is not a matter of Israel-and-the-Palestinians only. Responsible Israelis and responsible Palestinians both know that there will be no peace in the Middle East absent a pan-Arab recognition of Israel’s sovereign legitimacy.

Israel and the West are both confronted with two particularly grave threats in the early twenty-first century: the threat of Islamist jihadism, which has already caused enormous suffering while altering patterns of daily life throughout the world, and the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, led by men who believe that a new holocaust of the Jews will hasten the advent of the messianic age. Israel must not be put into a position of facing these threats alone. Those in the West who do not understand this should ponder the lessons of the late 1930s more carefully.

The campaign of delegitimation against Israel includes aspects of that anti-Semitism that has fouled parts of western culture for centuries and that must be forthrightly condemned by all who share the moral values of the Judaeo-Christian tradition...."

 (See the rest of Dr Weigel's relevant remarks here)

And see an example of a naive and foolish Catholic priest in the Australian Catholic Church's ancestral Ireland here

The Destruction of the Bedrock Values of Western Civilisation

Many readers will already  have discovered this interview with Marvellous Melanie, but for those who haven't, it's a 50-minute must-hear  (no need to stay glued to the screen).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asQ8KFrZY84

Hear her tell, inter alia, why antisemitism and anti-Zionism made her leave The Guardian ...

The Danger & Derangement of Social Justice Warriorism & "Intersectionality"

 As the conservative columnist Janet Albrechtsen remarks at the beginning of an article in the current issue of The Weekend Australian

"There is growing concern across the West that a new form of totalitarianism is on the march.  Not the jackboot, storm-trooping, Stasi-interrogating kind from the communist era. Ours is softer totalitarianism. It stifles speech, no-platforms people with different views, disfigures great works of literature to meet modern sensibilities, kills comedy to protect feelings, restrains writers from stepping into the shoes of others, thinks diversity in public broadcasting means putting people with different skin colour on TV, rejects an exquisite painting from past centuries because an artist lived by different norms, shames dissenters, sacks scientists, and depicts Western civilisation as a shameful story of colonial aggression, white privilege and rotten patriarchy.  This new, poorly named “progressive” project premised on the virtues of diversity, tolerance and justice is proving anything but diverse, tolerant and just..."

In the following video there are so many pearls of wisdom that I soon gave up attempting to itemise them.

Please listen to the wonderfully courageous and prescient Brexiteer Douglas Murray giving, this past June, a fascinating long interview to the admirable Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution on the whacky and worrying political and societal developments that prompted his books The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017) and the more recent The Madness of Crowds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQXHc-tJMXM

Sweden's Meltdown (video)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZQsbf4Ppuo

A 24-minute look at the anti-white agenda that with the Left's blessing is destroying Swedish civilisation, symbolised by the treatment of ancient artefacts, but not confined to them alone, as the tenets of another "culture" fills the vacuum caused by a country indoctrinated with self-loathing, one prepared to suborn the rights and safety of women and Jews to a misogynistic and antisemitic mindset that the warped Left has placed above criticism ...

(Hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog)

On the "feminist" Swedish government's horrifying sellout to Islamic misogynists see Bruce Bawer's powerful article here

Bonjour Sagesse! "These Lands Are Our Home; We Have No Other"

From the British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton and other European intellectuals, the so-called Paris Statement regarding the current malaise of Europe and what must be done to overset it.  ( "We ask all Europeans to join us in rejecting the utopian fantasy of a multicultural world without borders")

Inter alia (emphasis added), from a long and heartfelt document which deserves to be read and pondered in its entirety:

"Europe belongs to us, and we belong to Europe. These lands are our home; we have no other. The reasons we hold Europe dear exceed our ability to explain or justify our loyalty. It is a matter of shared histories, hopes and loves. It is a matter of accustomed ways, of moments of pathos and pain. It is a matter of inspiring experiences of reconciliation and the promise of a shared future. Ordinary landscapes and events are charged with special meaning—for us, but not for others. Home is a place where things are familiar, and where we are recognized, however far we have wandered. This is the real Europe, our precious and irreplaceable civilization....

The patrons of the false Europe are bewitched by superstitions of inevitable progress. They believe that History is on their side, and this faith makes them haughty and disdainful, unable to acknowledge the defects in the post-national, post-cultural world they are constructing. Moreover, they are ignorant of the true sources of the humane decencies they themselves hold dear—as do we. They ignore, even repudiate the Christian roots of Europe. At the same time they take great care not to offend Muslims, who they imagine will cheerfully adopt their secular, multicultural outlook. Sunk in prejudice, superstition and ignorance, and blinded by vain, self-congratulating visions of a utopian future, the false Europe reflexively stifles dissent. This is done, of course, in the name of freedom and tolerance....

 The true Europe is at risk because of the suffocating grip that the false Europe has over our imaginations. Our nations and shared culture are being hollowed out by illusions and self-deceptions about what Europe is and should be. We pledge to resist this threat to our future. We will defend, sustain and champion the real Europe, the Europe to which we all in truth belong....

As the nation states of Europe became more established and distinct, a shared European identity became stronger. In the aftermath of the terrible bloodshed of the world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, we emerged with an even greater resolve to honor our shared heritage. This testifies to the depth and power of Europe as a civilization that is cosmopolitan in a proper sense. We do not seek the imposed, enforced unity of empire. Instead, European cosmopolitanism recognizes that patriotic love and civic loyalty open out to a wider world....

 The true Europe has been marked by Christianity.... The autonomy of what we call civil society became a characteristic feature of European life. Moreover, the Christian Gospel does not deliver a comprehensive divine law, and thus the diversity of the secular laws of the nations may be affirmed and honoured without threat to our European unity. It is no accident that the decline of Christian faith in Europe has been accompanied by renewed efforts to establish political unity—an empire of money and regulations, covered with sentiments of pseudo-religious universalism, that is being constructed by the European Union....

The true Europe has never been perfect. The proponents of the false Europe are not wrong to seek development and reform, and there is much that has been accomplished since 1945 and 1989 that we should cherish and honor. Our shared life is an ongoing project, not an ossified inheritance. But the future of Europe rests in renewed loyalty to our best traditions, not a spurious universalism demanding forgetfulness and self-repudiation. Europe did not begin with the Enlightenment. Our beloved home will not be fulfilled with the European Union. The real Europe is, and always will be, a community of nations at once insular, sometimes fiercely so, and yet united by a spiritual legacy that, together, we debate, develop, share—and love....The true Europe is in jeopardy. The achievements of popular sovereignty, resistance to empire, cosmopolitanism capable of civic love, the Christian legacy of humane and dignified life, a living engagement with our Classical inheritance—all this is slipping away. As the patrons of the false Europe construct their faux Christendom of universal human rights, we are losing our home....

 The false Europe also boasts of an unprecedented commitment to equality. It claims to promote non-discrimination and the inclusion of all races, religions and identities. Here, genuine progress has been made, but a utopian detachment from reality has taken hold. Over the past generation, Europe has pursued a grand project of multiculturalism. To demand or even promote the assimilation of Muslim newcomers to our manners and mores, much less to our religion, has been thought a gross injustice. A commitment to equality, we have been told, demands that we abjure any hint that we believe our culture superior. Paradoxically, Europe’s multicultural enterprise, which denies the Christian roots of Europe, trades on the Christian ideal of universal charity in an exaggerated and unsustainable form. It requires from the European peoples a saintly degree of self-abnegation. We are to affirm the very colonization of our homelands and the demise of our culture as Europe’s great twenty-first century glory—a collective act of self-sacrifice for the sake of some new global community of peace and prosperity that is being born.

 There is a great deal of bad faith in this thinking. Most in our governing classes doubtless presume the superiority of European culture—which must not be affirmed in public in ways that might offend immigrants. Given that superiority, they think that assimilation will happen naturally, and quickly. In an ironic echo of the imperialist thinking of old, Europe’s governing classes presume that, somehow, by the laws of nature or of history, ‘they’ will necessarily become like ‘us’—and it is inconceivable that the reverse might be true. In the meantime, official multiculturalism has been deployed as a therapeutic tool for managing the unfortunate but ‘temporary’ cultural tensions....

Today, Europe is dominated by an aimless materialism that seems unable to motivate men and women to have children and form families. A culture of repudiation deprives the next generation of a sense of identity. Some of our countries have regions in which Muslims live with an informal autonomy from local laws, as if they were colonialists rather than fellow members of our nations. Individualism isolates us one from another. Globalization transforms the life prospects of millions. When challenged, our governing classes say that they are merely working to accommodate the inevitable, adjusting to implacable necessities. No other course is possible, and it is irrational to resist. Things cannot be otherwise. Those who object are said to suffer nostalgia—for which they deserve moral condemnation as racists or fascists. As social divisions and civic distrust become more apparent, European public life grows angrier, more rancourous, and no one can say where it will end. We must not continue down this path. We need to throw off the tyranny of the false Europe. There is an alternative....

In this moment, we ask all Europeans to join us in rejecting the utopian fantasy of a multicultural world without borders. We rightly love our homelands, and we seek to hand on to our children every noble thing that we have ourselves received as our patrimony. As Europeans, we also share a common heritage, and this heritage asks us to live together in peace as a Europe of nations. Let us renew national sovereignty, and recover the dignity of a shared political responsibility for Europe’s future."

Philippe Bénéton (France); Rémi Brague (France); Chantal Delsol (France); Roman Joch (Česko); Lánczi András (Magyarország); Ryszard Legutko (Polska); Roger Scruton (United Kingdom); Robert Spaemann (Deutschland); Bart Jan Spruyt (Nederland); Matthias Storme (België)

Read the entire statement here