Impeachment will likely prove the most disastrous political initiative since Richard Nixon involved himself directly in the Watergate defense strategy. Joe Biden had a perfect opportunity to be a president of unity and bipartisanship by watering down to a censure vote this second annual spurious impeachment of Donald Trump or forcing its abandonment altogether. If he had wished to couple such a statesmanlike gesture with a backhanded continuation of the malicious assault upon President Trump that has been uninterrupted these five years, he could have informally assured some sort of prosecution in the courts of the District of Columbia, where any Republican, the party of between 3% and 5% district residents, will be convicted of any charge, as if every juror were Congresswoman Maxine (“Impeach Trump!”) Waters. The strategic direction of the Democrats seemed extraordinarily astute at times in the last year: parachuting a discarded Joe Biden in ahead of a rampaging Bernie Sanders, invoking the coronavirus to keep the candidate in his basement while the airtight Democratic-media and social-media cartel conducted the Democratic campaign, and pushing mail-in voting and other changes to the electoral system under cover of the pandemic. There are many precedents for political leaders and strategists to be much more expert in gaining office than in executing it. If the Biden regime had opted for a de-escalation of hostilities by forcing through (and they would have had some Republican support for it) a reasonably worded censure of the president for his reckless exhortation on January 6, while leaving it to the D.C. kangaroo courts to tie up the former president in years of pretrial, trial, and appellate activity to get clear of the ludicrous complaint about to be pitched in the U.S. Senate, they could have extended their honeymoon, distracted the country from their already obvious shortcomings, and severely aggravated the fissiparous forces within the Republican Party. If the Democrats insist on producing witnesses and stretching the case out, they will strangle a Biden honeymoon that has already been largely wasted by their ostentatious refusal to make any compromise on an extravagant Covid-19 relief bill, by pandering to the open-borders minority of their followers, by a full-metal-jacket assault on the energy industry, by starting to dismantle the alliance Mr. Trump had forged between Israel and the principal Arab powers, and by warming up to the appeasement of the beastly theocracy in Iran. President Biden has rearranged the portraits and other decor in the Oval Office, as all incoming presidents do. He has placed a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt among the Founding Fathers of the country, removed the flags of the six armed forces, and prominently placed busts of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy. This is all perfectly reasonable, particularly for a Democratic president. It implies that he is conversant with FDR’s formulation in two speeches to the Congress in 1941 that revealed the basis of subsequent American foreign policy. In the State of the Union message of January of that year, FDR said: “We must always be wary of those who ‘with sounding brass and tinkling cymbal’ would preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement.” In his war message after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said: “We will make very certain that this form of treachery never again endangers us.” The enemies of America and of Western civilization devised a crude method of evading the determination of Roosevelt and all his successors to avoid appeasement of evil and to deter evil by any nation, by subsidizing terrorism whose national origin is difficult to trace and punish appropriately. By preparing to appease Iran, this president is sidling up to a policy that amounts to peace through weakness. All those with an interest — not just China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, but those who have come to rely on American strength and vigilance regarding its international strategic interests — will adjust their policies appropriately if this unpromising tendency is confirmed. Anonymous Homeland Security Department officials allegedly wrote last year that white supremacists are a greater threat to American national security than international terrorists. If that is the position of the new administration in national-security matters, this administration has already begun its descent into ignominy and failure, a journey that will be hastened by the contemptible farce of an impeachment trial of a retired president. That trial will also be the greatest possible revival of the political career that it is designed to end.
– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:
“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.” (The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)
– LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:
The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”
– On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:
“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”
– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:
“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.
People have the ability to hold more than one idea at a time…More With Melissa Mackenzie NewsletterPublisher, The American SpectatorWant to be heard? Email MackenzieM@Spectator.org.
Tom Brady & Gronk I don’t care about the NFL anymore and don’t watch it because of all the p.c. stupidity. In addition, I never liked Tom Brady and his pretty boy ways. HOWEVER…. I’m glad Tom and his team won. Not only did this geriatric football player make mincemeat of the opposition, a competitive feat that is extraordinary, he succeeded in making the Maskholes and the Racialists completely freak out. That’s a trifecta that takes some doing. I’m a total fan, now! Well done, Tom. May your off-season vegetarian diet keep you playing until you’re 100. May you win every game you ever play in. May Gronk never retire and you two cause gnashing of teeth forever.
About the January 6th debacleI’ve already written about it, but I’d like to say something about the thousands of decent people in D.C. to hear the President speak and then voice their concerns on The Hill. It is not fair that these people, and the president, are smeared as insurrectionists. The vast majority of people were peaceful, had no idea violence was happening and were as stunned and horrified as anyone else about the Capitol being desecrated and police officers being attacked. Also, it is possible to be totally against the violence, want the baddies rounded up, prosecuted and punted into jail AND to see that most people were decent. Finally, why is so little known a month later? A police officer died but his cause of death hasn’t been released. The media is saying he was murdered, but no one is making that case yet. How come some of the agitators weren’t included in the USA Today round-up and their images weren’t shown? Why were the Capitol police so unprepared? Who planted the pipe bombs? What did the FBI know? And why didn’t federal agents, who HAD to be in the crowd, intervene? The secret service was with the president, for heck’s sake. Too many questions. They need to be answered.
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On the few occasions that the USCCB has, as a body, decided to publicly criticize now-President Joe Biden for his more egregious rejections of Church teaching, a reminder has always been included that the bishops eagerly look forward to working with the new administration on those issues in which Biden’s politics do not contradict (or, at least, do not override) his professed Catholic faith. Thus, while the bishops condemn (as well they should) the president’s decision to send American tax dollars overseas to fund abortion, they heartily commend his endeavors in other tense areas of the social, political, and economic arenas.
Two actions in particular—among a first-week crop of unprecedented size—have won unearned episcopal praise. The first is a presidential memorandum calling for a review of the Trump administration’s replacement of the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. Such a review is a clear first step toward reinstating the Obama-era regulation—which placed heavy burdens on states and municipalities to prove that they were actively working against any possible racial discrimination or segregation in housing in order to receive any federal funding from HUD—or something very much like them. The second is an executive order instructing the United States attorney general not to renew any contracts with private, for-profit prisons.ADVERTISEMENT – CONTINUE READING BELOW
Both actions received the joint public endorsement of Bishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, chairman of the USCCB’s domestic justice committee, and Bishop Shelton Fabre of Houma-Thibodeaux, chairman of the conference’s anti-racism committee. Both of President Biden’s actions, according to the two committee chairmen—in framing borrowed, apparently without question, from the administration itself—“promote racial equity.”
There may be pragmatic reasons to seek common ground with the administration on matters of relatively less importance than, say, abortion. There is an undeniable political element to the episcopate, and the bishops may have good cause to curry favor with the temporal powers that is not readily apparent to those of us not in the know. To the extent that this is not a calculated or prudential judgment, however—that is, to the extent that the bishops actually believe what they are saying here—it ought to be quashed as quickly and conclusively as possible.
In justifying their endorsement of the criminal justice order, the bishops say simply that they “have long questioned the efficacy of private companies running prisons, and this step is a positive development in criminal justice reform.” That’s all well and good. There is plenty of room for a discussion about the prudence, and even the morality, of introducing profit incentives to the criminal justice system. Plenty of conservatives and Catholics have been conducting just that conversation for quite some time. One need not be a bleeding-heart liberal to wonder whether the cell block is an appropriate place for market economics.ADVERTISEMENT – CONTINUE READING BELOW
The question remains, then: why is this being packaged as a victory for “racial equity”? Therein lies the problem: the bishops have clearly bought into the narrative, peddled incessantly by the secular Left, that the criminal justice system is a holdout from America’s racist past. Does anybody honestly believe that de-privatizing the prisons in which criminal sentences are served out will shift the racial composition of the citizens who receive such sentences? I certainly hope not, and I retain too much respect for the bishops of our Church to allow myself to think any of them would. The very idea is ludicrous. There are complex, societal factors driving our current criminal justice problem, and none of them will go away by cutting off a few federal contracts for penal outsourcing.
The longer our leaders rely on the easy answers, insisting that obstinate racism is the great problem plaguing our society, the longer the real culprits—declining public morality, a failing education system, the collapse of communities, and the epidemic of single-motherhood—will go unaddressed. And the longer they do, the longer our incarcerated population will remain obscenely bloated and heavily skewed toward demographics whose true problems our out-of-touch leaders continuously fail to address. So much for racial equity; this approach will offer anything but.
Likewise, the bishops’ endorsement of Biden’s fair-housing move just doesn’t line up with reality. The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule was instituted by the Obama administration in an attempt to actively combat a perceived endurance of de facto segregation and housing discrimination. Again, there’s nothing objectionable about the general premise. But the practice was a train wreck. State and municipal governments were required to prove their anti-racist efforts to the federal government in order to receive funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.ADVERTISEMENT – CONTINUE READING BELOW
If a city is struggling to get by—if a city needs HUD funds, especially if it is dealing with complicated after-effects of generations-old racism, as many cities admittedly are—what could possibly make us think they should be diverting their attention, energy, and resources to proving to the federal government that they’re working really, really hard not to be racist? Surely they have better things to do, like…survive. In practice, it effectively holds poor communities hostage to the woke agenda. This is exactly what HUD concluded during the Trump administration: that the heavy burden on struggling municipalities generally hurt them in the end, with little demonstrable good toward the goal of “racial equity.” That’s why the Trump administration repealed the AFFH rule—a move to which the bishops publicly objected.
The government’s imposition of such regulations may be well-intentioned. I’m quite confident the bishop’s endorsement of it is. But at the end of the day, it just doesn’t work. At their very best, such top-down anti-racist policies do nothing. At their worst, they have the potential to do immense harm.
There may well be good instincts underlying them—instincts toward justice, instincts against hatred, the basic desires to see people live freely and well. But they are buried so deep beneath a mountain of bureaucratic red tape, pie-in-the-sky solutions to problems that don’t exist (and only distract from the real ones), and plain old-fashioned incompetence that the good will never see the light of day, and the instincts will never materialize into action. Any potential for positive change is effectively lost when the responsibility is taken up by a top-heavy institution whose only two real abilities are self-perpetuation and the art of doing nothing. Of course, that all must sound rather familiar to the USCCB.ADVERTISEMENT – CONTINUE READING BELOW
Feast of St. Scholastica (twin sister of St. Benedict, A.D. 480-543)
St. Scholastica, sister of St. Benedict, consecrated her life to God from her earliest youth. After her brother went to Monte Cassino, where he established his famous monastery, she took up her abode in the neighborhood at Plombariola, where she founded and governed a monastery of nuns, about five miles from that of St. Benedict, who, it appears, also directed his sister and her nuns. The year 2020 was one many people say they would like to erase from memory. Yet, many good people did many good and noble things in the year 2020, and Inside the Vatican, this year as in past years, recognizes here just a few of them. Obviously, these people we have chosen to highlight are not the only people worthy of recognition, but we think each is an example, an exemplar, in differing ways. Of course, there are millions of mothers caring for sick children, millions fathers caring for their families, thousands of legislators attempting to write just laws, countless artists striving to represent the mystery of divine truth to a world of hardened hearts. We honor them all! Still, we offer these 10 men and women as exemplary men and women, who have lived (and some of whom have died), with courage, honor, charity, tenderness, faith, generosity. In this way, these 10 have shown us the way, no matter how troubled our times may be. —RM An article today by Rod Dreher in the American Conservative sheds light on a profound problem that is emerging in our society but is still not being given sufficient attention by those who might be able to bring greater wisdom and healing to these matters. The article begins: “The journalist Abigail Shrier has a new Substack column out in which an anonymous source — a former Planned Parenthood worker — tells her how the organization allegedly handles young people who show up asking for cross-sex hormones. It’s eye-opening, to say the least. Most people do not realize that, as Shrier writes, ‘Planned Parenthood is now one of the largestproviders in the United States of cross-sex hormones like testosterone to females seeking medical gender transition.’ An excerpt from Abigail’s column: The employee insisted (both on Twitter and during our interview) that she was reluctant to say anything critical of Planned Parenthood because she believes in its core mission. “[T]hey still provide vital services for women,” she wrote on Twitter, and anti-abortion activists “will jump at any opportunity to smear them.” But she went on to write: “Having said that, their recent roles in trans activism are abhorrent, and they’re digging their own grave.” The Planned Parenthood clinic where she worked was located in a small town of roughly 30,000. Abortions were the clinic’s “bread and butter,” something this employee fully supports. But, she noted, “trans-identifying kids are cash cows, and they are kept on the hook for the foreseeable future in terms of follow-up appointments, bloodwork, meetings, etc., whereas abortions are (hopefully) a one-and-done situation.” How significant is this revenue stream? I’ve never been able to obtain numbers on that, though the Planned Parenthood website for Central and Western New York states that: “Nationally, Planned Parenthood is the second largest provider of Gender Affirming Hormone Care.” It seems reasonable to conclude that hormone treatments—pricey as they are—now contribute materially to Planned Parenthood’s bottom line. According to the employee, based on her recollection, 1-2 new biologically female teen patients seeking testosterone would arrive per day. A few reasonable assumptions and some arithmetic reveal that a shocking percentage of the town’s teen girls came through the clinic over just a few years. *** You can view the full article by Rod Dreher in the American Conservativehere.
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The Thirty TyrantsThe deal that the American elite chose to make with China has a precedent in the history of Athens and Sparta BY: LEE SMITHFEBRUARY 03, 2021 In Chapter 5 of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create “therein a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.” The example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly government Sparta established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war in 404 BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that Sparta’s system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military aristocracy ruling over a permanent servant class, the helots, who were periodically slaughtered to condition them to accept their subhuman status. Athenian democracy by contrast gave too much power to the low-born. The pro-Sparta oligarchy used their patrons’ victory to undo the rights of citizens and settle scores with their domestic rivals, exiling and executing them and confiscating their wealth. The Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and understanding its role and function helps explain what is happening in America today. For my last column, I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich. A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier, and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.” In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children. Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and by sending millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress? Returning those jobs to America, along with ending foreign wars and illegal immigration, was the core policy promise of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the source of his surprise victory in 2016. Trump was hardly the first to make the case that the corporate and political establishment’s trade relationship with China had sold out ordinary Americans. Former Democratic congressman and 1988 presidential candidate Richard Gephardt was the leading voice in an important but finally not very influential group of elected Democratic Party officials and policy experts who warned that trading with a state that employed slave labor would cost American jobs and sacrifice American honor. The only people who took Trump seriously were the more than 60 million American voters who believed him when he said he’d fight the elites to get those jobs back. What he called “The Swamp” appeared at first just to be a random assortment of industries, institutions, and personalities that seemed to have nothing in common, outside of the fact they were excoriated by the newly elected president. But Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite gave them collective self-awareness as well as a powerful motive for solidarity. Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public and private sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits but also the same center of gravity—the U.S.-China relationship. And so, the China Class was born. Connections that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent now became lucid under the light of Trump’s scorn, and the reciprocal scorn of the elite that loathed him. A decade ago, no one would’ve put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album, but here they are now, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing (Nike sneakers, iPhones, etc.) and a growing Chinese consumer market. The NBA’s $1.5 billion contract with digital service provider Tencent made the Chinese firm the league’s biggest partner outside America. In gratitude, these two-way ambassadors shared the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party with their ignorant countrymen. After an an NBA executive tweeted in defense of Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans to watch their tongues. “Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech,” said James, “it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.” Because of Trump’s pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from the U.S.-China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology. The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. But the schools and their name faculty were in fact in the business of selling that research, much of it paid for directly by the U.S. government—which is why Harvard and Yale among other big-name schools appear to have systematically underreported the large amounts that China had gifted them. Indeed, many of academia’s pay-for-play deals with the CCP were not particularly subtle. In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity, and national security.” But if Donald Trump saw decoupling the United States from China as a way to dismantle the oligarchy that hated him and sent American jobs abroad, he couldn’t follow through on the vision. After correctly identifying the sources of corruption in our elite, the reasons for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats foreign and domestic to our peace, he failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight. And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans, in fact, deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them. For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s. China’s lockdowns had nothing to do with the difference in outcomes. Lockdowns are not public health measures to reduce the spread of a virus. They are political instruments, which is why Democratic Party officials who put their constituents under repeated lengthy lockdowns, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are signaling publicly that it is imperative they be allowed to reopen immediately now that Trump is safely gone. That Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes is irrelevant to America’s version of the Thirty Tyrants. The job was to boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they succeeded. As with Athens’ anti-democratic faction, America’s best and brightest long ago lost its way. At the head of the Thirty Tyrants was Critias, one of Socrates’ best students, a poet, and dramatist. He may have helped save Socrates from the regime’s wrath, and yet the philosopher appears to have regretted that his method, to question everything, fed Critias’ sweeping disdain for tradition. Once in power, Critias turned his nihilism on Athens and destroyed the city. The poisoned embrace between American elites and China began nearly 50 years ago when Henry Kissinger saw that opening relations between the two then-enemies would expose the growing rift between China and the more threatening Soviet Union. At the heart of the fallout between the two communist giants was the Soviet leadership’s rejection of Stalin, which the Chinese would see as the beginning of the end of the Soviet communist system—and thus it was a mistake they wouldn’t make. Meanwhile, Kissinger’s geopolitical maneuver became the cornerstone of his historical legacy. It also made him a wealthy man selling access to Chinese officials. In turn, Kissinger pioneered the way for other former high-ranking policymakers to engage in their own foreign influence-peddling operations, like William Cohen, defense secretary in the administration of Bill Clinton, who greased the way for China to gain permanent most favored nation trade status in 2000 and become a cornerstone of the World Trade Organization. The Cohen Group has two of its four overseas offices in China and includes a number of former top officials, including Trump’s former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who recently failed to disclose his work for the Cohen Group when he criticized the Trump administration’s “with us or against us” approach to China in an editorial. “The economic prosperity of U.S. allies and partners hinges on strong trade and investment relationships with Beijing,”wrote Mattis, who was literally being paid by China for taking exactly that position. Yet it’s unlikely that Kissinger foresaw China as a cash cow for former American officials when he and President Richard M. Nixon traveled to the Chinese capital that Westerners then called Peking in 1972. “The Chinese felt that Mao had to die before they could open up,”says a former Trump administration official. “Mao was still alive when Nixon and Kissinger were there, so it’s unlikely they could’ve envisioned the sorts of reforms that began in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership. But even in the 1980s China wasn’t competitive with the United States. It was only in the 1990s with the debates every year about granting China most favored nation status in trade that China became a commercial rival”—and a lucrative partner. The chief publicist of the post-Cold War order was Francis Fukuyama, who in his 1992 book The End of History argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall Western liberal democracy represented the final form of government. What Fukuyama got wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t his assessment of the strength of political forms; rather it was the depth of his philosophical model. He believed that with the end of the nearly half-century-long superpower standoff, the historical dialectic pitting conflicting political models against each other had been resolved. In fact, the dialectic just took another turn. Just after defeating communism in the Soviet Union, America breathed new life into the communist party that survived. And instead of Western democratic principles transforming the CCP, the American establishment acquired a taste for Eastern techno-autocracy. Tech became the anchor of the U.S.-China relationship, with CCP funding driving Silicon Valley startups, thanks largely to the efforts of Dianne Feinstein, who, after Kissinger, became the second-most influential official driving the U.S.-CCP relationship for the next 20 years. In 1978, as the newly elected mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein befriended Jiang Zemin, then the mayor of Shanghai and eventually president of China. As mayor of America’s tech epicenter, her ties to China helped the growing sector attract Chinese investment and made the state the world’s third-largest economy. Her alliance with Jiang also helped make her investor husband, Richard Blum, a wealthy man. As senator, she pushed for permanent MFN trade status for China by rationalizing China’s human rights violations, while her friend Jiang consolidated his power and became the Communist Party’s general secretary by sending tanks into Tiananmen Square. Feinstein defended him. “China had no local police,” Feinstein said that Jiang had told her. “Hence the tanks,” the senator from California reassuringly explained. “But that’s the past. One learns from the past. You don’t repeat it. I think China has learned a lesson.” Yet the past actually should have told Feinstein’s audience in Washington a different story. The United States didn’t trade with Moscow or allow Russians to make large campaign donations or enter into business partnerships with their spouses. Cold War American leadership understood that such practices would have opened the door to Moscow and allowed it to directly influence American politics and society in dangerous ways. Manufacturing our goods in their factories or allowing them to buy ours and ship them overseas would’ve made technology and intellectual property vulnerable. But it wasn’t just about jeopardizing national security; it was also about exposing America to a system contradictory to American values. Throughout the period, America defined itself in opposition to how we conceived of the Soviets. Ronald Reagan was thought crass for referring to the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire,” but trade and foreign policy from the end of WWII to 1990 reflected that this was a consensus position—Cold War American leadership didn’t want the country coupled to a one-party authoritarian state. The industrialist Armand Hammer was famous because he was the American doing business with Moscow. His perspective was useful not because of his unique insights into Soviet society, politics, and business culture that he often shared with the American media, but because it was understood that he was presenting the views that the politburo wanted disseminated to an American audience. Today, America has thousands of Armand Hammers, all making the case for the source of their wealth, prestige, and power. It started with Bill Clinton’s 1994 decision to decouple human rights from trade status. He’d entered the White House promising to focus on human rights, in contrast to the George H.W. Bush administration, and after two years in office made an about face. “We need to place our relationship into a larger and more productive framework,” Clinton said. American human rights groups and labor unions were appalled. Clinton’s decision sent a clear message, said then AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, “no matter what America says about democracy and human rights, in the final analysis profits, not people, matter most.” Some Democrats, like then Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, were opposed, while Republicans like John McCain supported Clinton’s move. The head of Clinton’s National Economic Council, Robert E. Rubin, predicted that China “will become an ever larger and more important trading partner.” More than two decades later, the number of American industries and companies that lobbied against Trump administration measures attempting to decouple Chinese technology from its American counterparts is a staggering measure of how closely two rival systems that claim to stand for opposing sets of values and practices have been integrated. Companies like Ford, FedEx, and Honeywell, as well as Qualcomm and other semiconductor manufacturers that fought to continue selling chips to Huawei, all exist with one leg in America and the other leg planted firmly in America’s chief geopolitical rival. To protect both halves of their business, they soft-sell the issue by calling China a competitor in order to obscure their role in boosting a dangerous rival. Nearly every major American industry has a stake in China. From Wall Street—Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley— to hospitality. A Marriott Hotel employee was fired when Chinese officials objected to his liking a tweet about Tibet. They all learned to play by CCP rules. “It’s so pervasive, it’s better to ask who’s not tied into China,” says former Trump administration official Gen. (Ret.) Robert Spalding.Unsurprisingly, the once-reliably Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce was in the forefront of opposition to Trump’s China policies—against not only proposed tariffs but also his call for American companies to start moving critical supply chains elsewhere, even in the wake of a pandemic. The National Defense Industrial Association recently complained of a law forbidding defense contractors from using certain Chinese technologies. “Just about all contractors doing work with the federal government,” said a spokesman for the trade group, “would have to stop.” Even the Trump administration was split between hawks and accommodationists, caustically referred to by the former as “Panda Huggers.” The majority of Trump officials were in the latter camp, most notably Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Hollywood producer. While the film industry was the first and loudest to complain that China was stealing its intellectual property, it eventually came to partner with, and appease Beijing. Studios are not able to tap into China’s enormous market without observing CCP redlines. For example, in the upcoming sequel to Top Gun, Paramount offered to blur the Taiwan and Japan patches on Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” jacket for the Chinese release of the film, but CCP censors insisted the patches not be shown in any version anywhere in the world. In the Trump administration, says former Trump adviser Spalding, “there was a very large push to continue unquestioned cooperation with China. On the other side was a smaller number of those who wanted to push back.” Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump’s penultimate day in office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.” That makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide. The idea that countries that scorn basic human and democratic rights should not be directly funded by American industry and given privileged access to the fruits of U.S. government-funded research and technology that properly belongs to the American people is hardly a partisan idea—and has, or should have, little to do with Donald Trump. But the historical record will show that the melding of the American and Chinese elites reached its apogee during Trump’s administration, as the president made himself a focal point for the China Class, which had adopted the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle. That’s not to say establishment Republicans are cut out of the pro-China oligarchy—Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell’s shipbuilder billionaire father-in-law James Chao has benefited greatly from his relationship with the CCP, including college classmate Jiang Zemin. Gifts from the Chao family have catapulted McConnell to only a few slots below Feinstein in the list of wealthiest senators. Riding the media tsunami of Trump hatred, the China Class cemented its power within state institutions and security bureaucracies that have long been Democratic preserves—and whose salary-class inhabitants were eager not to be labeled as “collaborators” with the president they ostensibly served. Accommodation with even the worst and most threatening aspects of the Chinese communist regime, ongoing since the late 1990s, was put on fast-forward. Talk about how Nike made its sneakers in Chinese slave labor camps was no longer fashionable. News that China was stealing American scientific and military secrets, running large spy rings in Silicon Valley and compromising congressmen like Eric Swalwell, paying large retainers to top Ivy League professors in a well-organized program of intellectual theft, or in any way posed a danger to its own people or to its neighbors, let alone to the American way of life, were muted and dismissed as pro-Trump propaganda. The Central Intelligence Agency openly protected Chinese efforts to undermine American institutions. CIA management bullied intelligence analysts to alter their assessment of Chinese influence and interference in our political process so it wouldn’t be used to support policies they disagreed with—Trump’s policies. It’s no wonder that protecting America is not CIA management’s most urgent equity—the technology that stores the agency’s information is run by Amazon Web Services, owned by China’s No. 1 American distributor, Jeff Bezos. For those who actually understood what the Chinese were doing, partisanship was a distinctly secondary concern. Chinese behavior was authentically alarming—as was the seeming inability of core American security institutions to take it seriously. “Through the 1980s, people who advanced the interests of foreign powers whose ideas were inimical to republican form of government were ostracized,” says a former Obama administration intelligence official. “But with the advent of globalism, they made excuses for China, even bending the intelligence to fit their preferences. During the Bush and Obama years, the standard assessment was that the Chinese have no desire to build a blue-water navy. It was inconvenient to their view. China now has a third aircraft carrier in production.” Loathing Trump provided their political excuse, but the American security and defense establishment had their own interest in turning a blind eye to China. Twenty years of squandering men, money, and prestige on military engagements that began in George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” have proved to be of little strategic value to the United States. However, deploying Americans to provide security in Middle East killing fields has vastly benefited Beijing. Last month Chinese energy giant Zen Hua took advantage of a weak Iraqi economy when it paid $2 billion for a five-year oil supply of 130,000 barrels a day. Should prices go up, the deal permits China to resell the oil. In Afghanistan, the large copper, metal, and minerals mines whose security American troops still ostensibly ensure are owned by Chinese companies. And because Afghanistan borders Xinjiang, Xi Jinping is worried that “after the United States pulls troops out of Afghanistan, terrorist organizations positioned on the frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan may quickly infiltrate into Central Asia.” In other words, American troops are deployed abroad in places like Afghanistan less to protect American interests than to provide security for China’s Belt and Road Initiative. “There’s a belief that we are not in the same type of conflict with them as we were with the USSR,” says the former Obama official. “But we are.” The problem is that virtually all of the American establishment—which is centered in the Democratic Party—is firmly on the other side. As late as the summer of 2019, Trump looked like he was headed for a second term in the White House. Not only was the economy soaring and unemployment at record lows, he was rallying on the very field on which he’d chosen to confront his opponents. Trump’s trade war with Beijing showed he was serious about forcing American companies to move their supply chains. In July, top American tech firms like Dell and HP announced they were going to shift a large portion of their production outside of China. Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet said they were also planning to move some of their manufacturing elsewhere. It was at exactly this same moment, in late June and early July of 2019 that the residents of Wuhan began to fill the streets, angry that officials responsible for the health and prosperity of the city’s 11 million people had betrayed them. They were sick and feared getting sicker. The elderly gasped for breath. Marchers held up banners saying, “we don’t want to be poisoned, we just need a breath of fresh air.” Parents worried for their children’s lives. There was fear that the ill had suffered permanent damage to their immune and nervous systems. Authorities censored social media accounts, photos, and videos of the protests, and undercover policemen watched for troublemakers and detained the most vocal. With businesses forced shut, there was nowhere for protesters to hide. Some were carted off in vans. They’d been warned by the authorities: “Public security organizations will resolutely crackdown on illegal criminal acts such as malicious incitement and provocation.” What sent the residents of Wuhan to the streets at the time wasn’t COVID-19—which wouldn’t begin its spread until the winter. In the early summer of 2019, what threatened public health in Wuhan was the plague of air pollution. This is a hitherto untold part of the story of America’s ghastly last year. To deal with the mounds of garbage poisoning the atmosphere, authorities planned to build a waste incineration plant—a plan that rightly alarmed the people who lived there. (In 2013, five incineration plants in Wuhan were found to emit dangerous pollutants.) Other cities had similarly taken to the streets to protest against air pollution—Xiamen in 2007, Shanghai in 2015, Chengdu in 2016, Qingyuan in 2017—each time sending waves of panic through CCP leadership, which was fearful of the slightest echo of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and of the prospect of unruly democracy protests in Hong Kong making their way to the mainland and igniting a popular brushfire. What if unrest spread from one city to the next, with the entire country, 1.4 billion people, eventually spinning out of control? The way to keep unrest from going viral, the CCP had learned, was to quarantine it. The party has shown itself especially adept at neutralizing the country’s minority populations, first the Tibetans, and most recently the Turkic ethnic Muslim minority Uyghurs, through mass quarantines and incarcerations, managed through networks of electronic surveillance that paved the way to prisons and slave labor camps. By 2019, the grim fate of China’s Uyghurs had become a matter of concern—whether heartfelt or simply public relations-oriented—even among many who profited hugely from their forced labor. The country’s 13.5 million Uyghurs are concentrated in Xinjiang, or East Turkestan, a region in northwestern China roughly the size of Iran, rich in coal, oil, and natural gas. Bordering Pakistan, Xinjiang is a terminus point for critical supply routes of the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s $1 trillion project to create a global Chinese sphere of interest. Any potential disruptions of the BRI constitute a threat to vital Chinese interests. Xi saw an April 2014 attack in which Uyghur fighters stabbed more than 150 people at a train station as an opportunity to crackdown. Prepare for a “smashing, obliterating offensive,” Xi told police officers and troops. His deputies issued sweeping orders: “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.” Officials who showed mercy were themselves detained, humiliated, and held up as an example for disobeying “the party central leadership’s strategy for Xinjiang.” According to a November 2019, New York Times report, Chinese authorities were most worried about Uyghur students returning home from school outside the province. The students had “widespread social ties across the entire country” and used social media whose “impact,” officials feared, was “widespread and difficult to eradicate.” The task was to quarantine news of what was really happening inside the detention camps. When the students asked where their loved ones were and what happened to them, officials were advised to tell “students that their relatives had been ‘infected’ by the ‘virus’ of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured.” But it wasn’t just those most likely to carry out terrorist attacks—young men—who were subject to China’s lockdown policy. According to the documents, officials were told that “even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared.” When a real virus hit in the fall of 2019, Chinese authorities followed the same protocol, quarantining not just prospective troublemakers but everyone in Wuhan in the hope of avoiding an even larger public outcry than the one they’d quelled in the same city just months before. There is a good reason why lockdowns—quarantining those who are not sick—had never been previously employed as a public health measure. The leading members of a city, state, or nation do not imprison its own unless they mean to signal that they are imposing collective punishment on the population at large. It had never been used before as a public health measure because it is a widely recognized instrument of political repression. At the end of December 2019, Chinese authorities began locking down social media accounts mentioning the new virus, doctors who warned of it or spoke about it with their colleagues were reprimanded and another, allegedly infected by COVID-19, died. All domestic travel in and out of Wuhan was stopped. If the purpose of the lockdowns was really to prevent spread of the contagion, it’s worth noting that international flights continued. Rather, it appears that the domestic travel ban, like the social media censorship, was to keep news of the government’s blunder from spreading throughout China and leading to massive, perhaps uncontrollable, unrest. If Wuhan’s streets had filled in June and July to protest the authorities’ deadly incompetence when they concealed plans for an incinerator that would sicken the population of one city, how would the Chinese public respond upon discovering that the source for a respiratory illness destined to plague all of the country wasn’t a freak accident of nature that occurred in a wet market, as officials claimed, but the CCP’s own Wuhan Institute of Virology? In January, the Trump administration’s former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger told British officials that the latest American intelligence shows that the likeliest source of COVID-19 is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Pottinger, according to The Daily Mail—a British publication was one of the few Western press outlets that reported Pottinger’s statements—claimed the pathogen may have escaped through a leak or an accident. According to a State Department fact sheet published in January, the United States “has reason to believe that several researchers inside the Wuhan lab became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak.” The fact sheet further explains that the Chinese government lab has conducted research on a bat coronavirus most similar to COVID-19 since 2016. Since at least 2017, the WIV has conducted classified research on behalf of the Chinese military. “For many years the United States has publicly raised concerns about China’s past biological weapons work, which Beijing has neither documented nor demonstrably eliminated, despite its clear obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.” Evidence the pandemic didn’t start in a Wuhan wet market was published as early as January 2020, days after Beijing implemented the lockdown on Jan. 23. According to the British medical journal The Lancet, 13 of the first 41 cases, including the first one, had no links to the market. In May the head of China’s center for disease control and prevention confirmed that there was nothing to link COVID-19 and the wet market. “The novel coronavirus had existed long before” it was found at the market, said the Chinese official. After the Lancet report, Republican officials close to the Trump administration disputed Beijing’s official account. “We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that,” Sen. Tom Cotton said in February. “We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.” Cotton said the Chinese had been duplicitous and dishonest. “We need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says,” Cotton said. “And China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all.” The corporate American press disparaged Cotton’s search for answers. Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post claimed that Cotton was “fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts.” Trump was derided for contradicting American spy services when the president said he had a high degree of confidence that the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab. Sen. Ted Cruz said that in dismissing obvious questions about the origins of the pandemic the press was “abandoning all pretenses of journalism to produce CCP propaganda.” The January publication of a New York Magazine article by Nicholson Baker arguing the same case that Trump and GOP officials had been making since last winter raises useful questions. Why did journalists automatically seek to discredit the Trump administration’s skepticism regarding Beijing’s origin story of the coronavirus? Why wait until after the election to allow the publication of evidence that the CCP’s story was spurious? Sure, the media preferred Biden and wanted Trump gone at any cost—but how would it affect the Democrat’s electoral chances to tell Americans the truth about China and COVID-19? China had cultivated many friends in the American press, which is why the media relays Chinese government statistics with a straight face—for instance, that China, four times the size of the United States, has suffered 1/100th the number of COVID-19 fatalities. But the key fact is this: In legitimizing CCP narratives, the media covers not primarily for China but for the American class that draws its power, wealth, and prestige from China. No, Beijing isn’t the bad guy here—it’s a responsible international stakeholder. In fact, we should follow China’s lead. And by March, with Trump’s initial acquiescence, American officials imposed the same repressive measures on Americans used by dictatorial powers throughout history to silence their own people. Eventually, the pro-China oligarchy would come to see the full range of benefits the lockdowns afforded. Lockdowns made leading oligarchs richer—$85 billion richer in the case of Bezos alone—while impoverishing Trump’s small-business base. In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat, city and state authorities normalized autocracy. And not least, lockdowns gave the American establishment a plausible reason to give its chosen candidate the nomination after barely one-third of the delegates had chosen, and then keep him stashed away in his basement for the duration of the Presidential campaign. And yet in a sense, Joe Biden really did represent a return to normalcy in the decades-long course of U.S.-China relations. After Biden’s election, China’s foreign minister called for a reset of U.S.-China relations but Chinese activists says Biden’s policy toward China is already set. “I’m very skeptical of a Biden administration because I am worried he will allow China to go back to normal, which is a 21st-century genocide of the Uyghurs,” one human rights activist told The New York Times after the election. With Biden as president, said another “it’s like having Xi Jinping sitting in the White House.” In November a video circulated on social media purporting to document a public speech given by the head of a Chinese think tank close to the Beijing government. “Trump waged a trade war against us,” he told a Chinese audience. “Why couldn’t we handle him? Why is it that between 1992 and 2016, we always resolved issues with the U.S.? Because we had people up there. In America’s core circle of power, we have some old friends.” The appreciative crowd laughed along with him. “During the last three to four decades,” he continued, “we took advantage of America’s core circle. As I said, Wall Street has a very profound influence … We used to rely heavily on them. Problem is they have been declining since 2008. Most importantly after 2016 Wall Street couldn’t control Trump … In the U.S.-China trade war they tried to help. My friends in the U.S. told me that they tried to help, but they couldn’t. Now with Biden winning the election, the traditional elites, political elites, the establishment, they have a very close relationship with Wall Street.” Is it true? The small fortune that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has earned for simply speaking in front of Wall Street audiences is matter of public record. But she had hard words for Beijing at her confirmation hearing last month, even criticizing the CCP for “horrendous human rights abuses” against the Uyghurs. But the resumes of Biden’s picks for top national security posts tell a different story. Incoming Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked at a Beltway firm called WestExec, which scrubbed its work on behalf of the CCP from its website shortly before the election. Longtime Biden security aide Colin Kahl, tapped for the No. 3 spot at the Pentagon, worked at an institute at Stanford University that is twinned with Peking University, a school run by a former CCP spy chief and long seen as a security risk by Western intelligence services. As head of the Center for American Progress think tank, Biden’s pick for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, teamed up with a U.S.-China exchange organization created as a front “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority” of the CCP and “influence overseas Chinese communities, foreign governments, and other actors to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing.” Biden’s special assistant for presidential personnel, Thomas Zimmerman, was a fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, flagged by Western intelligence agencies for its ties to China’s Ministry of State Security. U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield gave a 2019 speech at a Chinese-government-funded Confucius Institute in Savannah, Georgia, where she praised China’s role in promoting good governance, gender equity, and the rule of law in Africa. “I see no reason why China cannot share in those values,” she said. “In fact, China is in a unique position to spread these ideals given its strong footprint on the continent.” The family of the incoming commander-in-chief was reportedly given an interest-free loan of $5 million by businessmen with ties to the Chinese military, while Biden’s son Hunter called his Chinese business partner the “spy chief of China.” The reason that the press and social media censored preelection reports of Hunter Biden’s alleged ties to the CCP was not to protect him—$5 million is less than what Bezos has made every hour during the course of the pandemic. No, for the pro-China oligarchy, the point of getting Joe Biden elected was to protect themselves. Reports claiming that the Biden administration will continue the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to roll back China’s technology industry are misdirection. The new administration is loaded with lobbyists for the American tech industry, who are determined to get the U.S.-China relationship back on track. Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain was formerly on the executive council of TechNet, the trade group that lobbies on behalf of Silicon Valley in Washington. Biden’s White House counsel is Steve Ricchetti whose brother Jeff was hired to lobby for Amazon shortly after the election. Yellen says that “China is clearly our most important strategic competitor.” But the pro-China oligarchy is not competing with the country from which it draws its wealth, power, and prestige. Chinese autocracy is their model. Consider the deployment of more than 20,000 U.S. armed forces members throughout Washington, D.C., to provide security for an inauguration of a president who is rarely seen in public in the wake of a sporadically violent protest march that was cast as an insurrection and a coup; the removal of opposition voices from social media, along with the removal of competing social media platforms themselves; the nascent effort to keep the Trump-supporting half of America from access to health care, credit, legal representation, education, and employment, with the ultimate goal of redefining protest against the policies of the current administration as “domestic terrorism.” What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen. Like Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, they are not simply contemptuous of a political system that recognizes the natural rights of all its citizens that are endowed by our creator; they despise in particular the notion that those they rule have the same rights they do. Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it properly. Like Critias and the pro-Sparta faction, the new American oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power—and they are happy to rule in partnership with a foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen. What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year. Lee Smith is the author of the newly-published book The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President.
Rip McIntosh
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on The elite that Friedman describes saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige
“They lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us.”
Constitutional lawyer Robert Barnes Retweeted:Cerno@Cernovich “They lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us.” – attributed to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and while the sourcing isn’t confirmed, it’s certainly more accurate today than ever in the USSR. [https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1355527266751533057]
Francis Notes:
– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:
“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.” (The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)
– LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:
The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”
– On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:
“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”
– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:
“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.
My father, a journalist named Boris Shcharansky, was born in 1904 in Odessa, the cultural and economic center of the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian empire stuck most Jews. He studied in the Jewish Commercial Gymnasium, because most other gymnasiums accepted very few Jews, if any. By the time he was 16, he had already lived through the Czarist Regime with its anti-Semitic restrictions, the “February” Socialist Revolution, the “October” Bolshevik Revolution, and the years of civil war when power in Odessa seesawed back and forth from faction to faction, as hunger, pogroms, and destruction decimated the population.
When the Soviets finally emerged from the chaos, therefore, my father was hopeful. The Communists promised that a new life of full equality was dawning, without Pales of Settlement, without education restrictions, and, most important, with equal opportunities for all. Who wouldn’t want that? One of my father’s brothers discovered Zionism and went off to Palestine. But my father was excited about building a world of social justice and equality closer to his home.
From the time he was a kid, my bookish father loved making up stories. Lucky for him, Odessa was emerging as a center for a new cultural medium—cinema. As silent Charlie Chaplin-type movies started evolving into more scripted sketches, my father put his storytelling talents to work. Imagine his thrill when, as a twenty-something, he saw millions watch a script that he had written come to life.
Of course, to succeed in his career as a screenwriter, he had to follow certain rules. His scripts, like every other work of art, had to follow the script of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, seeing the world through the lens of class struggle and class exploitation. As Karl Marx argued, and the Bolsheviks now decreed, “the history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight.”
Everything had to serve Communist ideology: every institution, every medium, every art form. Lenin particularly appreciated the propaganda potential of movies, declaring, “Cinema for us is the most important of the arts.” So while all creative artists had to subordinate plot, character, and complexity to advancing the Bolshevik political agenda, movie-makers endured extra scrutiny. The term “politically-correct,” which is popular today, emerged in the late 1920s, to describe the need to correct certain deviants’ thought to fit the Communist Party Line. Any positive characters with bourgeois origins had to eventually check their privilege, condemn their past as oppressors, and publicly take responsibility for their sins.
At first, True Believers who championed the Revolution’s noble aims easily accepted these restrictions. But as the Red Terror grew, the mounting attacks on religion and nationalism and private property destroyed most people’s illusions. The number of True Believers kept shrinking as the fear kept spreading.
Yet amid the disillusionment, no one wants to sacrifice their personal dreams; you still want to see your work produced. After all, it’s your chosen career path and it’s your only way to influence the world. As the Party Line you follow publicly becomes increasingly disconnected from what you believe or see or experience privately, your cynicism grows along with your mental agility—your skill in living and writing in two contradictory scripts at once. That’s how you become a doublethinker.
To keep his stories approved, and to lessen the risk of rejection—or exposure—my father scoured the official Soviet press, seeking pre-approved heroes. Once, he read about some White Army soldiers who escaped to Turkey, and wished to return to Mother Russia. The tension in the story centered around their former officers, who were blocking them from returning to their homeland. My father’s imagination—then his pen—created a tragic but adventurous script about ordinary people caught in the midst of a power struggle. The Ukrainian producer Alexander Dovzhenko, just launching what would be a legendary career, green-lit the script immediately.
The script jumped through the censorship hoops, from office to office. In one of the very last offices, one apparatchik questioned the story’s ideological purity. “Why should we be sympathetic—and possibly invite sympathy,” he asked, “to enemies of the Revolution?” The dreaded second question immediately followed: “Who is this scriptwriter who sympathizes with these class-traitors?”
A local newspaper soon ran an article about the young scriptwriter’s bourgeois origins and Zionist connections—because of the brother who moved to Palestine. My father was cancelled.
Fearing for his life, my father fled the film industry, Odessa, and his beloved creative world, in 1929. Landing in an obscure Ukrainian industrial center, which today is known as Donetsk, he spent the rest of his writing career as a journalist, celebrating the proletarians building the new Soviet world in a series of industrial journals. Every article he wrote perpetuated his double life, as he took whatever facts there were, and massaged them all into upbeat news that would make him look loyal and the Revolution look successful. Knowing that any deviations from the ideological vision would be dismissed as “bourgeois lies,” my father became part of a vast assembly line manufacturing the Soviet version of “fake news.” He understood that—as would be said a century later by an activist Member of the U.S. Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—more important than “being precisely, factually, and semantically correct,” he had to be “morally right”—meaning in line with the official ideology.
I was born almost 20 years later, in 1948. My father had fought as a soldier in the Red Army in World War II for four years, and had returned a hero. In a family which lost so many friends and relatives in the Holocaust, then watched so many friends suffer during Josef Stalin’s political and anti-Semitic purges, my father’s flight from Odessa had long ago paled in significance next to the horrors that he and others had lived through. My parents, now in their fifties, were thrilled that they finally had children after years of yearning—and thankful to have left the very worst years behind them.
Every day, my father went to work—still seeking interesting stories. But, when it came to writing them up, his imagination had to shrink, his mouth had to be wired shut, his hand had to cramp tight, as he produced what the Party required. He knew the handicapped journalism he created was not true journalism, the art that resulted was not true art, the thoughts triggered were not real thoughts and the conversations surrounding it all were not real conversations. Yet my father remained a storyteller at heart—and now he had an audience—my older brother by two years and me.
When my father came home from work, he could leave the suffocating grey false universe he helped to create behind, and welcome his beloved family into a full-color world. From the time we were very young, he would tell us stories on three levels—explaining to us what the author said, what the author wished to say, and what the author could not say. When we started, from a very young age, our ritual of weekly outings to the movies, he would recreate the movie for us on the way home, filling in what the screenwriter probably wanted to write, and explain what he could not write.
My father distracted himself—as a father, a husband, an overwhelmed 50-something-year-old Soviet citizen expending so much energy just to manage the daily lines, the weekly grind, the monthly strain of running out of money before running out of month. But he also had two other great escapes. Many neighboring dads frittered away their money every payday on vodka; my father’s vice was books. He loved to buy books, to read the classics, to throw himself into alternate realities, where his imagination could roam free—without a price to pay or a Party Line to uphold. He also kept tabs on the reality his articles regularly distorted by listening regularly, in secret, to the Voice of America, or BBC, or whatever other free Western radio channels the Soviets didn’t succeed in jamming completely at that particular moment.
Still, with all that, he never stopped looking for an opportunity to stop self-censoring and strangling his creative impulses. In 1962, nearly a decade after Stalin’s death, during the short period of Khrushchev’s “thaw,” my father was thrilled when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published, in the Soviet journal Novy Mir, a searing account describing suffering in the Gulag: “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Perhaps here was a chance to write something about Stalin’s purges in Donetsk before the war, or Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns after the war.
Encouraged after a few discrete inquiries, my father started writing away. When he took his draft to a local publishing house in 1963, the editors read it with great excitement. People had forgotten what it was like to read a compelling account of a complex moment in recent history.
Alas, the excitement faded quickly. “You had to have brought this kind of material to us a year ago,” they sighed. “Today, we fear a backlash”—which actually did come.
Many of my father’s youthful friends from Odessa kept writing, helping to generate Soviet art for half-a-century after my father’s flight in the late 1920s. Some went on to become famous cinematographers, journalists, writers, and poets. The greater their prominence, the higher the risk that they would be disgraced—or worse. Their desperation to produce, to publish, grew. If their work was ignored, they couldn’t justify their existence—or keep up their lifestyles and reputations.
But the price kept getting steeper. Each time, Josef Stalin attacked the intelligentsia yet again, their vulnerability grew, their juggling acts became ever-more elaborate—and their cultural output became ever-blander, safer, flatter.
This was the cost of tunnel vision writing with a hyper-partisan lens, the compression in insight and the plunge in quality that comes from only seeing the world as one big class struggle—then sacrificing literary freedom to prop up the delusion as the dream turns nightmarish.Share→︎TwitterFacebookEmailPrintLinkCopied link
I remember meeting my father’s friends from “the old Odessa days,” periodically, three decades later when I was a kid. I would overhear them trading stories about the Great Patriotic War, about the Holocaust, about their families. Inevitably, he and his visiting friend would compare notes describing their efforts to remain in the game. No one was ever quite sure what would be permitted or not, what red line they might cross tomorrow; what “macro-aggression” or “micro-aggression” they might suddenly be found guilty of committing. To be a man of letters in a sea of fear was to worry about drowning constantly.
Many writers had convinced themselves in the 1940s that there was one safe topic—the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. Here, they hoped, was a chance to overcome this double life, an opportunity to lessen the ideological grip on their souls and their pens, by telling a story in which everyone had loyally united against the enemy. But they underestimated the Communist Party’s insatiable, uncompromising need to dominate, to impose its orthodoxy thoroughly, everywhere.
Alexander Fadeyev was one of the most successful writers in the Soviet Union. He remained a True Believer and Stalin devotee for years. In 1943, he interviewed more than 100 witnesses to recreate the story of a small group of young heroes in a marginal Ukrainian town who resisted the Nazis until all were killed. The book, The Young Guard, became wildly popular, and was turned into a film. But, at a certain point, Stalin himself supposedly objected, snapping at Fadeyev: “You have written a book that is not just worthless but ideologically harmful.” Stalin wondered how these young people could “have dealt effectively with the enemy in the occupied territory without Party leadership?” Such insolence suggested anarchy.
It wasn’t just truth that had to be faked, history itself had to be changed, becoming putty in the hands of the Party. A serious ideological flaw had been identified in Fadeyev’s work, by no less an authority than Stalin himself. Understanding that these criticisms could be life-threatening, Fadeyev rewrote and republished the book, with wise, heroic, completely-made-up Party hacks inspiring his heroes.
The humiliation was worth it to him. Despite the criticism, he could stay at the head of the Union of Soviet Writers. Membership in this massive union gave writers all kinds of privileges: vacations in fancy sanatoriums; shops with imported food but without lines, and, most important of all, permission to be published. Of course, every published work had to promote Socialist Realism. Alas, this ideological purity, which guaranteed millions of sales, was also a one-way ticket to literary mediocrity.
Fadeyev took great pride in looking after so many writers’ needs. He was very devoted to them—except when he had to sign off on one literary purge after another. Though sometimes it was just some outing, some shaming, some bullying—often it was far deadlier. Fadeyev even kept silent after Aug. 12, 1952, when Josef Stalin had 13 Yiddish writers executed, including some of Fadeyev’s close friends.
Outwardly, Fadeyev played the role of the literary grandee, the VIP, the loyal Communist. Inwardly, he was collapsing. Even after Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev rose to power, this former True Believer turned unhappy doublethinker continued filling the growing guilt-induced emptiness inside with vodka. Finally, in 1956, Fadeyev wrote to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: “It is impossible for me to live any further since the art to which I have given my life has been destroyed by the self-confident, ignorant leadership of the Party and can no longer be corrected. … Literature—this holy of holies—was handed over for extermination to bureaucrats and the most backward elements of the people, and from the highest tribunals.”
Fadeyev remembered the incredible “feeling of freedom and openness” when “my generation entered literature during Lenin’s life.” But, then, the Party “brought us down to the level of children; they destroyed us; they threatened us ideologically and called this “the Party spirit.” Today, he lamented, the “few individuals who have retained the holy fire in their souls” are pariahs. As for him, all his “lofty thoughts and feelings,” propelled by “the excellent ideas of Communism,” crashed and burned. Now, he was “a horse pulling a broken-down cart,” watching literature become “debased, persecuted, and destroyed.” After finishing the note, he shot himself in the heart.
This was the cost of tunnel vision writing with a hyper-partisan lens, the compression in insight and the plunge in quality that comes from only seeing the world as one big class struggle—then sacrificing literary freedom to prop up the delusion as the dream turns nightmarish.
Looking back at the history of Soviet literature, it’s hard to find any of the thousands of writers from Fadayev’s union who wrote anything worth reading or remembering. Their books, published on a massive scale—often selling millions—simply disappeared. It was inevitable: the heroes of the books, like their authors, were doublethinkers, living a life of lies. Eventually, their lies consumed both the characters and their authors, leaving nothing behind.
By contrast, the works that lasted defied Stalinist orthodoxies in the service of truths, both immediate and internal. Stalin killed some of these honest writers, like the poet Osip Mandelstam. Some killed themselves, like the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Some lived daily with the fear of arrest, or under the shadow of purges, like Anna Akhmatova. Some, like the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, accepted the fact that their books would go unpublished in Russia—his classic The Master and Margarita didn’t see the light of day for decades. Others, like Boris Pasternak, who smuggled Dr. Zhivago to the West, sought readers elsewhere and paid the price back home—where Pasternak was punished for his betrayal by being expelled from Fadeyev’s Union of Soviet Writers.
In short, the lesson I have learned from the writers of my father’s generation is that those who resisted the life of doublethink then are the one who keep influencing us now.
I started my own life as a doublethinker at the age of five in 1953, when Josef Stalin died. The seventy-four-year-old despot was at the peak of his anti-Semitic campaign—and Jews were increasingly nervous. On that March day, out of any neighbor’s earshot, my father told my seven-year-old older brother and me, “Today is a great day that you should always remember. This is good news for us Jews. This man was very dangerous to us.” But,” he added, “don’t tell this to anybody. Do what everybody else does.” The next day, in kindergarten, as we sang songs honoring Stalin, “the hope of all the people,” and mourned his death, I had no idea how many children were crying sincerely, and how many were only following their father’s instructions.
The end of Stalin’s life, therefore, marked my entry into the Soviets’ deceptive order of doublethinkers. This round-the-clock public charade defined the typical life of a loyal Soviet citizen. You knew to be politically correct in everyday life. You said and wrote and did everything you were supposed to do, while knowing it was all a lie. You only acknowledged the truth with your family and a very close circle of trusted friends.
If in the first generations after 1917 the choice had been between being a True Believer and a doublethinker, by my generation there were few True Believers left. Your field of vision had to be very narrow indeed to still see the crumbling society around us as some kind of Communist paradise. My peers were choosing between Doublethink and Dissent. True, after the Communist Party turned away from Stalin’s policy of murderous purges, dissent usually only cost you your career or your freedom rather than your life. Nevertheless, few were willing to cross the line from Doublethink to Dissent.
Still, it was hard to pick out the doublethinkers. As in kindergarten, I could never know who was sincere and who was playacting—even though we all knew that more and more of us were living lies. External observers watching millions of citizens marching loyally in May 1 demonstrations, saluting their leaders, concluded that we were all True Believers. The KGB secret police, however, knew how few within the adoring crowd were sincere.
To keep the growing mass of doublethinkers under control, the KGB turned our daily life into a series of tests. There were constant probes, some subtle, some direct, to determine your loyalty. You had to watch your language, your gestures, your reactions, your friendships—because “they” were always watching you.
In the Soviet web of lies, even as a child, your main job is to fit in. At the age of ten you join the Pioneers, proclaiming your patriotism. Then you join the Komsomol, the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, proclaiming your patriotism. You mouth their platitudes, you play the good citizen, in order to get ahead in your own life.
My father—and mother—had one more maneuver for coping with doublethink—the classic Jewish dance of escaping through their children, sacrificing, doing whatever they could, hoping their kids would have a better life than they did. When I was five, my mother taught me to play chess. “Here you can think freely,” she said. “In chess, you can fly.”
I tried playing and fell in love immediately: thoughts soar, risks are taken, wits and courage are prized, not punished. Chess became my first passport into the world of free thought, my first great escape. Watching The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix this fall, I identified with Beth Harmon the chess prodigy. Chess can easily feel like a great escape from the prison of your life, be it psychological or political.
Alas, while chess could free my mind and sharpen my wits, it was only a game. It offered no wisdom, no ideological worldview, no way of life, nothing greater than myself and my skills. It was a great diversion, freeing me from doublethink for a few hours every day, but it wasn’t real. It was an escape into a parallel black-and-white world of 32 pieces on an eight-by-eight board.
Science and mathematics seemed to promise a better escape from the smothering Soviet reality. While as objective and creative as chess, the scientific method illuminated the real world. We scientist applied whatever talents we had to understand how the universe worked.
Mastering these fields seemed to offer the best path to a better life. To pass every exam, no matter how difficult, with the highest marks and to be accepted to one of the best universities, became my great ambition. It was the dream driving every Soviet Jewish parent—who drilled into their children that as Jews, the best way to overcome the handicap of being Jewish was by being the best in your chosen profession.
With each passing year, my faith grew in the world of science as my Ivory Tower, my escape.
I spent my high school years as an academic grind, drowning in problem sets, working around the clock to amass five out of fives in mathematics and physics. Because I knew that I had to follow a very specific script to get the character reference I needed from the local Komsomol authorities, I also spouted the right slogans, participated in the right youth activities, and sang the right songs. Yet even after I fulfilled my young dreams and made it to MFTI—Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Soviet equivalent of MIT—the scrutiny continued. We math and science students had to keep paying lip service to the Soviet gods, like everyone else. We kept taking tests on Marxist doctrine every semester, even when studying at the postdoctoral level. A few years later, I would be amused when, during my interrogations, I spied my KGB tormentors studying their Communist handbooks whenever they could. I liked knowing that these never-ending trials kept tormenting them.
Our professors subtly encouraged us to brush such annoyances aside. We were the elite, they kept telling us, racing toward a golden future. It was all worth it. I was luxuriating in the sanctuary of science, an asylum protected from the daily insanity the Soviets imposed on nearly everyone else. I decided that the deeper I was into my scientific career, the less stressful this double life would be.
It was a comforting illusion—until I read Andrei Sakharov’s manifesto.
Sakharov was our role model, the number one Soviet scientist sitting at the peak of the pyramid each of us was trying to climb so single-mindedly. In May 1968, this celebrity scientist circulated a ten-thousand-word manifesto that unleashed a wrecking ball which smashed my complacent life. “Intellectual freedom is essential to human society,” Sakharov declared. Bravely denouncing Soviet thought-control, he mocked “the ossified dogmatism of a bureaucratic oligarchy and its favorite weapon, ideological censorship.”
Sakharov warned that Soviet science was imperiled without “the search for truth.” Imagining “two skiers racing through deep snow,” Sakharov explained. While the Soviet skier had started catching up to the American one—who first “broke the snow”—our suffocating lack of freedom kept us “not only lagging behind but … also growing more slowly.” At the time, there were few who could understand the depths of this critique. The Soviet Union wasn’t just relying on its scientific wizards to develop nuclear weapons; we now know that the research ran in tandem with an elaborate spying operation that stole as many of America’s atomic secrets as it could.
The message was clear for us. Sakharov helped us realize that the Soviet restrictions on free thought ran deep. You now only have to control your political opinions, but every interaction with your colleagues, every new insight, has to be checked and rechecked, for fear of ideological implications that could destroy a career in this world where even entire fields of inquiry were cancelled for being politically incorrect. Soviet scientists spent so much time looking over their shoulders and in their rear-view mirrors that they could not plunge ahead and catch up with their Western peers.
Long before most others, Sakharov saw in the Soviet scientific community the equivalent of the literary mediocrity we all saw in Soviet Realism. He was warning me and my peers that there was nowhere to run to escape the suffocating realities that had handicapped my father’s work. Life in a dictatorship offers two choices: either you overcome your fear and stand for truth, or you remain a slave to fear, no matter how fancy your titles, no matter how big your dacha.
I would never escape from this life of doublethink with all my Ivory Tower half-measures, I realized. Eventually, I became a Soviet Jewish Refusenik and a Soviet dissident, fighting for my identity, which included insisting on my right to live as a free Jew in our homeland, Israel, while fighting for freedom, which included championing human rights for all people, whether they lived in the Soviet Union or Israel, or anyplace else on earth.
In fact, I underwent a two-step process. There was Sakharov. And there was Jewishness.
In June, 1967, Israel abruptly entered our lives. Suddenly, everyone around us was connecting us as Soviet Jews—for good or bad—to Israel and to “our” victory after the Six Day War. Intrigued, I started reading about the Jewish State I barely knew. As a result, I discovered the history, the people, the state I soon I realized wanted to belong to.
In embracing my Jewishness, I inherited a 3,900-year-old identity—the history, values, ideas, and country that would shape me. That breakthrough, that realization that there was something greater than my personal struggle for survival and professional success, propelled me to end a life of doublethink. Only by ending that sterile careerist life could I speak freely.
Breaking the shackles is the hardest thing to do as a doublethinker. Once you do that, the released energy gives you a rush you’ve never experienced before. Step by liberating step, I was running toward freedom. By the time I was imprisoned in 1977, I had been free for at least four years. As thrilling as it was to be released from prison after nine long years in 1986, leaving the prison of doublethink years earlier made me even more euphoric.
Over the last three decades in freedom, I have noticed that—with apologies to Tolstoy—every dictatorship is oppressive in its own way, but the doublethinkers’ mental gymnastics are all alike.Share→︎TwitterFacebookEmailPrintLinkCopied link
In my post-doublethink life as a free person, I would have to make many difficult decisions. As an activist in the Soviet Union, I spent 13 years constantly weighing how far to go in my confrontations with the KGB, knowing that my freedom and my life were at stake. In 1974, I had to decide with my fiancée, Avital, if we should stay together in Moscow, or if I should watch her move to Israel the day after we married, separating us for who knew how long. While in the Gulag, I had to decide whether to submit to the Soviet terms for my freedom or to prolong my imprisonment indefinitely.
Decades later, while serving in the Israeli cabinet, I had to decide many times whether to keep my hard-fought position as a minister serving my voters, or to resign on principle when the government moved in a direction I couldn’t accept.
Still, none of these decisions terrified me as much as my choice in 1973 to request a simple letter from my friendly boss, certifying where I worked. It should have been nothing, something procedural that I, as a good careerist, had done many times in my life. All I had to do was walk down the very familiar hallway in the Institute of Oil and Gas, where I worked as a computer specialist, to speak to my boss, with whom I got along just fine. But that move was so nerve-racking that I had to take a tranquilizer that morning, for the first and only time in my life.
That was my first public step in applying for a visa to Israel. With that request, I formally ended my life as a doublethinker, playing their game by their rules. As I committed suicide within the Soviet system, as I ended my double life, which began with Stalin’s death when I was five, I could practically see the Ivory Tower I had built to protect me crumbling before my eyes.
Once I had done it, once I was no longer afraid, I realized what it was to be free. I could live in history, a real history, with ups and downs, fits and starts, not the bland, ever-changing history-like-putty dictated by the authorities. I could live with real people and enjoy real friendships, not the cautious, constricted conversations of winks and nods among fellow doublethinkers. Most important, I could live without that permanent self-censorship, that constant checking of what you are going to say to make sure it’s not what you want to say. Only then do you realize what a burden you’ve been carrying, how exhausting it is to say the right thing, do the right thing, while always fighting the fear of being outed for an errant thought, a wrong reaction, an idiosyncratic impulse.
And that was why, during nine years in prison, when the KGB would try tempting me to restore my freedom and even my life by returning to the life I once had, it was easy to say “no.” I knew what they wanted. They wanted to take me back to this open-caged prison of doublethink.
It was easy enough to remind myself and them who was really free and who is a scared doublethinker. All I had to do was tell some joke about the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Thank God, there were plenty of yarns about his arrogance, his crudeness, his senility. One kidded about him forcing Soviet cosmonauts to outdo the American astronauts who landed on the moon by rocketing to the sun, then reassuring them they wouldn’t be incinerated because they’d be launched during the night. As I’d tell my interrogators a joke, I’d laugh. And, as normal Soviet doublethinkers themselves, they would want to laugh. But they couldn’t, especially if two of them were there together. Laughter would end their careers.
So they’d covered up that temporary glint in their eyes with a tantrum. They’d pound the table, shouting, “HOW DARE YOU?”
“Look,” I’d say to them calmly, “you can’t even smile when you want to smile. And you claim that I’m in prison and you’re free?”
I did this to irritate them, because they spent so much time trying to irritate me. But, mainly, I was reminding myself that I was free, as long as I could laugh or cry in accordance with my own feelings.
Over the last three decades in freedom, I have noticed that—with apologies to Tolstoy—every dictatorship is oppressive in its own way, but the doublethinkers’ mental gymnastics are all alike. The feeling of release from the fear and giddy relief when crossing the line from doublethink to democratic dissent is also universal across cultures. This understanding prompted the Town Square Test I use to distinguish between free societies and fear societies: Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society.
In the West today, the pressure to conform doesn’t come from the totalitarian top—our political leaders are not Stalinist dictators. Instead, it comes from the fanatics around us, in our neighborhoods, at school, at work, often using the prospect of Twitter-shaming to bully people into silence—or a fake, politically-correct compliance. Recent polls suggest that nearly two-thirds of Americans report self-censoring about politics at least occasionally, essentially becoming a nation of doublethinkers despite the magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights
To preserve our integrity and our souls, the quality of our political debate and the creativity so essential to our cultural life, we need a Twitter Test challenging bottom-up cultural totalitarianism that is spreading throughout free societies. That test asks: In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated, or cancelled? Ultimately, whether you will live as a democratic doublethinker doesn’t depend on the authorities or on the corporations that run social media platforms: it depends on you. Each of us individually decides whether we want to submit to the crippling indignity of doublethink, or break the chains that keep us from expressing our own thoughts, and becoming whole.
Natan Sharansky was a political prisoner in the Soviet Union and a minister in four Israeli governments. Gil Troy is a presidential historian at McGill University and a Zionist activist.
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What follows here are the canonical steps by which Bergoglio can be peacefully, easily and lawfully removed from his position of power.
First, any Catholic Bishop or Cardinal, whether holding jurisdiction or not, whether of the Latin Rite or not, in his capacity as a member of the College of Bishops needs to make this public declaration, or its equivalent:
As member of the College of Bishops, whose unity with the Successor of Saint Peter is essential to its proper function in the Church for the accomplishment of the will of Christ, to continue His Salvific Mission on Earth, I hereby declare that I have examined the official Latin text of Pope Benedict XVI’s act of renunciation of February 11, 2013 A.,D., which begins with the words Non solum propter, and I have found that it is not in conformity with the requirement of Canon 332 §2, that states explicitly that a papal resignation only occurs when the Supreme Pontiff renounces the Petrine Munus. Seeing that Pope Benedict renounced only the ministeriumwhich he received from the hands of the Cardinals, and seeing that he did not invoke Canon 38 to derogate from the obligation to name of the office in a matter which violates the rights of all the Faithful of Christ, and even more so, of the members of the College of Bishops, to know who is and who is not the Successor of Saint Peter, and when and when not he has validly renounced his office, I declare out of the fullness of my apostolic duty and mission, which binds me to consider first of all the salvation of souls and the unity of the Church, that Pope Benedict XVI by the act expressed in Non Solum Propter never renounced the Papal Office and therefore has continued until this very day to be the one and sole and true and only Vicar of Jesus Christ and Successor of Saint Peter. I therefore charge the College of Cardinals with gross negligence in the performance of their duties as expressed in Canon 359 and n. 37 of Universi Domini Gregis by proceeding in February and March of 2013 to the convocation and convening of a Conclave to elect Pope Benedict’s successor when there had not yet been consummated a legal sede vacante. And thus I do declare the Conclave of 2013 was uncanonically convoked, convened and consummated and that the election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergogio as Successor of Saint Peter is null and void and irritus by the laws themselves of Holy Mother Church, as established by Pope John Paul II.
Second, Catholic Bishops and Cardinals and indeed all the Faithful should personally examine the text of February 11, 2013 according to the norms of Canons 332 §2, canon 17, canon 38, canon 145 §1, canon 41, canon 126, and in particular canon 188. (see ppbxvi.orgfor more information.)
Third, the Cardinals and Bishops should hold spontaneous regional or universal Synods to confirm the same and publicly affirm the same.
Fourth, the Bishops and Cardinals should call on the Swiss Guard and Vatican Police to arrest Cardinal Bergoglio and detain him and obtain from him public affirmation of the same.
Fifth, the Cardinals should approach Pope Benedict XVI and ask if it is now his intention to resign the Petrine Munus or not. If not, they should convey him to Saint John Lateran’s and acclaim him with one voice as Pope and ask his forgiveness publicly for having defected from him and elected an antipope. If so, they should ask him to redo the renunciation, this time renouncing the Petrine Munus; and then they should convene a Conclave to elect Benedict’s legitimate successor.
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ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
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