American physicians, American medical technology, and often, but not always, American pharmacology are the best in the world, and this is often acknowledged by Europeans, who frequently must scurry to catch up to us.  However, not is all gold that glitters.  One of the fundamental problems of American medicine is the question of costs and who is to bear them.  The new Medicare regulations adopted in November 2003 promise to alleviate one problem, namely the cost, sometimes prohibitively high cost, of prescription medicines for senior citizens.  Although the measure to provide pharmaceutical benefits to seniors passed handily, it was opposed by critical thinkers on both ends of the political spectrum: conservatives and libertarians opposed it as another example of when government “fixers” rush in where angels fear to tread, with probable serious consequences for government deficits. Liberals oppose it because they see government preparing to enrich pharmaceutical manufacturers and their owners and officials.  Some observers go so far as to say that much Democratic opposition — that of Senator Edward Kennedy, for example — was based on a fear of having the opposite party take credit for doing something that Democrats want to claim as their own special field of concern.  All this contention boils down in large measure to the question of cost.  Medicine costs too much; who can pay for it?  Europeans who admit the superiority of American medicine with respect to its achievements criticize it for the way it distributes its benefits.

On the one hand, anyone who has had to enter an emergency room for a sudden illness or serious accident has reason to appreciate the treatment and care that are quickly made available.  On the other hand, those who have gone in for something relatively trivial, such as a nosebleed or a broken finger, may have been more shocked by the bill than by the injury.  Dr. Klaus Wentzel, head of orthopedics at the rehabilitation center in Bad Schmiedeberg, Germany, tells of what happened to his son who suffered an injured hand while on a visit to the U.S.A.  The first doctor that he saw told him that nothing serious was wrong, to go home and keep exercising the fingers, charging $200 for the advice.  Troubled, the lad called his father, who told him to try another doctor.  The second physician diagnosed a broken metacarpal bone and put the hand in a splint, all for the modest charge of $600.

German medicine has a high standard; German doctors quickly pick up discoveries made in the U.S.A. and add their own and those of other Europeans.  Somehow they do this at considerably less cost than their American colleagues.  Both Dr. Wentzel and a colleague, a gynecologist who was also interviewed, live in the former German Democratic Republic, and practiced medicine for their first few years under the Communist system.  To the interviewer’s surprise, both doctors said that the practice of medicine was superior under Communism.  Their reason:   under the Communist system, a physician was able to prescribe for any patient what he thought that patient needed.  Under the new system, since die Wende (the turn) that combined the east and the west, the physicians’ choices are increasingly controlled, as they are in the United States, by insurance considerations.  Under Communism, they did not have all of the technical equipment that is now available and there were fewer of the newest drugs, but on the whole, the doctors said that it was better for the patients.  For anyone familiar with the lamentable state of economic life under the DDR, this must seem absurd, yet it is what the doctors said, and they say it even while acknowledging that they themselves are economically better off under the new economy.

The Austrians, who also speak German, have no recent experience of Communist rule, but they share many of the opinions of the Germans.  Among all of the physicians interviewed, both German and Austrian, there was massive rejection of “physician assisted suicide,” i.e. of euthanasia.  “Doctors must never kill,” was repeatedly said.   In general, this condemnation also applied to abortion, which is legal in both countries during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy.  Physicians in both Germany and Austria are well aware of the reality that abortion takes a human life and all of those interviewed opposed it in principle, although some of them seem readier to agree to an abortion than to euthanasia, which is massively rejected by everyone.

The University of Vienna has an Institute for Ethics and Justice in Medicine, founded in 1993 as a reaction to a scandal in which several patients in old people’s homes were “terminated” by a sympathetic nurse.  The current head, Prof. Ulrich H. C. Körtner, is a professor of Protestant theology; his predecessor was a professor of Roman Catholic theology.  Although Austria seems far less religious than the United States, the public universities have theological faculties, and both Protestant and Catholic theologians are allowed to speak and be heard on the subject of medical ethics, something that seems all but impossible in the United States.  Prof. Körtner evoked a new and growing problem in medical ethics, which he called Pflegeethik, care ethics.  The Austrian population is aging, as is the case in the rest of Europe.  Adults are marrying less and having fewer children.  The older custom, in which adult children cared for old parents and other relatives, has all but vanished, and old people are increasingly cared for — in the extreme case, warehoused — in retirement homes.  The Europeans seem to be more and more dependent on immigration from Africa, West Asia, and elsewhere to operate the machines and work the farms.  Will those new immigrants be willing to assume the costs of caring for old Austrians who, during their earlier years, preferred to enjoy the fruits of the consumer economy rather than raise children?

Europe is facing a demographic catastrophe, which has now progressed so far that it may be impossible to remedy.  While the soldiers of the United States and our coalition partners patrol recently subjugated lands in West Asia, immigrants from West Asia are gradually filling up the empty places in the West, and immigrants from Latin America are doing something similar here in the United States.  In the United States, the demographic crisis is not yet so acute, and it may not be irreversible.  In order to reverse it, large segments of the American-born population, white and black, will have to begin to obey the first commandment of the Bible, “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28).  The current national fascination with homosexuality is only an extreme form of the preoccupation with non-reproductive sex that is statistically certain to promote the aging of our American-born population and increase our dependence on new immigrants, legal and illegal, to do the things we are increasingly unwilling to do, such as to provide for our own “golden years” and to care for our aged and infirm citizens.  It is not too late to change, at least not in the United States, but it will take a great ethical and spiritual renewal to produce the motivation necessary to effect such a change.

Students of Roman history have been unable to reach a consensus on why the greatest empire of ancient times (at least in the West) collapsed as rapidly and thoroughly as it did.  In the fourth century, Julian “the Apostate” (361-363), the last pagan emperor, was confident enough of Roman might to try to conquer Persia, yet only  half a century later, Rome itself was sacked by barbarians.  Pagan Romans attributed the fall of Rome to the influence of Christianity, while St. Augustine blamed it on the Romans’ failure to preserve the moral standards of their great predecessors.  We in the West are not “afflicted” by a surging Christian movement, and so we may consider ourselves immune to that danger, but we certainly share with the late Roman pagans a dramatic decline in personal and public morality, especially in the sexual realm.  Another widely recognized significant factor was the shrinking of the old Roman and Italian population, which had formed the basis for the conquering legions of earlier centuries.  In the later centuries, soldiers had to be recruited from everywhere else except Rome and Italy.  The Roman population was fascinated with sex but not reproductive sex, and depended on “bread and circuses” for sustenance and amusement.   Rome increasingly had to rely on mercenaries, often led by Germanic generals, for its defense, and when Germanic soldiers confronted Germanic invaders, they did not always prevail.  The Visigoths overran and plundered Rome itself in 410, and in 476 the last Western emperor, Romulus Augustulus (a diminuitive form of Augustus), was deposed by the German Odovacer and sent into retirement with a public pension.

In the United States, we do not yet have to recruit our military forces from recent immigrants, but the time when that happens may not be so far away. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28).  American forces are able to subdue several regions of the earth, but if our population continues its present pattern of decadence and decline, it will not be long before we face the same situation faced by the Roman Empire in the fifth century.

In the run-up to the Christmas season, a well-known mail order firm, marketer of excellent products, produced a “holiday gift catalog.”  Readers could have searched the entire catalog in an effort to discover the name of the holiday for which gifts were to be bought and given.  Only a few days later, another catalog from the same firm arrived.  “It’s not too late to order.”  Gifts ordered by December 22 or even December 23 would arrive “in time.”  In time for what?  In time to arrive on December 25, the catalog said, but avoided naming the day, leaving the reader without any indication that the writers know what is celebrated on that day or who should buy gifts and for what reason they should be bought.

Should we encourage their ignorance by buying from them, or should we wait until they can say, “by Christmas”?

Readers of major media have surely noted the tendency to replace “Christmas” with generic “holiday,” and there are some plausible reasons for doing this.  It does not necessarily imply a refusal to say a word beginning with Christ. After all, there are several holidays, genuine ones and recently made-up ones.   In previous years, the tendency to abbreviate Christmas as Xmas offended some pious souls, who took it as a kind of de-Christianization of the festival, forgetting that the X could be seen as the Greek chi, the first letter of Christos.  But Xmas has been forgotten, and so, apparently, has Christmas.   Can it be that we are developing a culture in which to be politically correct one must avoid the C-word, just as one must do with the N-word and increasingly with other words too numerous to mention here?  Let those who know what the C stands for unite in saying “Merry Christmas!” as loudly and clearly as they are able, to everyone willing to listen.

Amid the controversy surrounding the election and consecration of the Rev. Gene Robinson as Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, one significant factor that preceded his espousal of the gay life went largely unnoticed.  Mr. Robinson had a wife and children.  He abandoned them in order to join up with a male “partner.”  To establish this new relationship — one that his church and its Scripture have up until now held to be abominable  — he has claimed personal autonomy and broken the existing covenant with his wife.  Incidentally, he had to violate the pledges made in his ordination to the priesthood.  None of this matters when personal autonomy is at stake.

The marriage service in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer speaks of matrimony as an honorable estate, ordained by God and regulated by his commandments.  But commandments, even the Commandments of God, have no weight today when human autonomy is at stake.  The only commandment of the Ten that explicitly deals with sexual matters says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” extolling the sacredness of the marriage covenant.  If Mr. Robinson had simply divorced and abandoned his lawful wife and taken up with another woman, in all probability he would not have been considered a viable candidate for the episcopate.  There was a time when it was impossible for a divorced man to be ordained as a minister, much less a bishop.  In order to be able to embrace his “gay” partner, the future bishop had to break the marriage covenant, which should have disqualified him for the ministry, not to speak of the episcopate.

In other words, by embracing a member of his own sex, committing what the Bible often calls “abomination” or “perversion” (Leviticus 20:12), the future bishop canceled the fault of divorce.  In other words, the consecration of Bishop Robinson is a wonderful example of two wrongs being treated as through they made a right.  One of the many arguments used against “gay marriage,”  promoted by the Massachusetts Superior Court decision in Goodridge, is that it will grievously injure normal marriage.  Thus it is symbolic that the consecration of the first openly “gay” bishop (not at this time married to his inamoratus) followed a repudiation of his marriage vows and abandonment of his family by the candidate.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the opinion of the Supreme Court in Lawrence, the Court’s 2003 sodomy decision, spoke grandly of the right of each individual to determine for himself or herself the meaning of essentially everything, and the Massachusetts Superior Court decision echoed this opinion.  But is it true?  Is this not the opinion of Satan in Paradise Lost, that “The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heaven”?  No matter how sincerely and fervently human beings may believe and profess a thing, it is true only if it really is true.  A series of abortion decisions by the Supreme Court establishes the legal doctrine that an unborn child (enfant en ventre de sa mere, as the older legal language put it) is or is not a child depending on the wish of the woman to be or not to be a mother.  Is it or is it not?  In the mind of the court, it all depends.  In the mind of God, it is what he intends it to be, a human being in the process of development.

According to philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, one of the conditions that tends to promote the rise of total government control exists when people forget their interpersonal bonds and treat themselves as little absolute monarchs.  This creates what she calls “the atomistic mass.” By this she means the situation in which there are no significant ties between people, but all are humans related only to and through the State.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau spoke of “the abolition of every particular dependency” as a condition of freedom.  This is a deceptive kind of freedom.  The individual without ties may feel himself free, until his lack of self-restraint forces the State to restrain him.

Abortion, promoted as necessary to a woman’s autonomy and self-authentification, abolishes the natural law principle of inter-generational dependency:  the child in its mother’s womb is uniquely dependent on her and she on him or her.  The weakening of marriage through easy divorce reduces the oldest and most sacred covenant between human beings to nothing more than a civil association. By going further and paralleling traditional marriage with another arrangement, “gay” marriage, society will take another important step toward creating the atomistic mass, and soon the momentary euphoria of total autonomous freedom will have to yield to total control.  If each human being is a law unto himself or herself, then all covenants between humans become void, to be honored only when it pleases the autonomous individual to do so. Ultimately the interpretation of freedom as meaning absolute individual autonomy is unendurable for society, for the existence of the State depends on obligations reliably fulfilled.  As autonomous individual freedom grows, the authority of the absolute State grows even more.  It is the necessary development to prevent chaos.

When time-honored covenants between humans have gone the way of the covenant between God and men, there will be no alternative to the government expanding its regulative function to regulate everything — which is the condition known as totalitarianism.

The survival of human freedom depends on the existence and health of intermediate structures, mediating institutions between the individual and the State.  Without them, the individual is “naked to the State.”  The claim of total individual autonomy, if it does not eventuate in total chaos, will lead to total control.  The liberty which our Declaration of Independence says is endowed by the Creator will cease to exist when our people fully replace their covenants with God and man with the claim of total individual autonomy.  The debilitation of marriage, total legalization of abortion of over 40 million humans, and now the enshrining of homosexuality as a nearly sacred rite, creates a momentary frenzy of total freedom, but it will not last.  Either the society that practices these things will collapse, or it will endure by replacing absolute autonomy with total State control.

The German Christian Democratic Union, egged on by the ruling Social Democrats, debated how severely to punish Bundestag representative Martin Hohmann for allegedly anti-Semitic remarks.  The media coverage of what he said has yet to present readers with the actual text of his remarks, but the tone in which they are alleged to have been uttered is constantly escalating.  Apparently he began by citing the role of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and in the Soviet secret police (of which more below); more recently he is accused of comparing the Jews to the Nazis.  Herr Hohmann’s basic contention is that Germans should be allowed to get beyond eternally repenting for the Holocaust.  It seems that victors in wars are able more quickly to get over mourning for the atrocities they themselves committed than are the defeated.  Thus the American South is continually being pressed to repent for apologize for, and even to pay reparations for African slavery and subsequent discrimination, but the victorious North hardly regrets the destruction wrought by Union Generals Sherman and Sheridan in the successful effort to crush the South.  We easily dismiss the horrible carnage wrought by the British and United States air forces in the war against German cities, and by the United States in the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  “It was war!”  Of course it was, and there is no real comparability between attacking German and Japanese urban concentrations from the air — after all, the inhabitants could have fled to the hills and the forests — with the systematic Nazi/German extermination of the Jews and “sub-human” minorities.  And there is no comparability between the way in which the Germans continue to mull over and to be excoriated for Nazi atrocities and the comparative indifference with which we look on what our own forces have done.  The Danube River, for example, is still blocked by the destruction of bridges in President Clinton’s “air campaign,” memories of which have now receded in the U.S.A. thanks to the Iraq war — but not in Serbia.

On November 12, another suicide bomber attacked the headquarters of the Italian military police in Nasirya in southern Iraq.  At least 18 Italians were killed, plus nine Iraqis.  Needless to say, the bombing has caused horror in Italy, where most people seem to think that Italy has no business maintaining a presence in Iraq.  Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, often the butt of criticism for his liberal (i.e. “right-wing”) convictions, most recently for his defense of Russian President Putin, has vowed to stay the course.  The old proverb, “Well begun is half done,” does not seem to apply in Iraq.  The Italians chose a beautiful name for their operation, Antica Babilonia.  The Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller, visiting Iraq, took a review of his 2,500 troops in front of the restored Ishtar Gate of the ancient metropolis.  The Poles have had only one casualty so far; the Polish general staff reckons that its Iraq engagement will cost twenty-five lives.  The Polish prime minister declared, “We made the decision to send troops for political and moral reasons.  We are bound to this decision and see no possibility of changing it.  We shall remain until the Iraqi government can assume the responsibility for the care of her people.”  The Poles seem more realistic than the Italians in that they estimated from the outset that their Iraq mission would cost lives.   U.S. Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld has made similar pronouncements in the U.S.A.  The United States forces consist of volunteers, while both Italy and Poland have conscription.

The relative naturalness with which the U.S. and European media report “suicide bombing” obscures the fact that the suicide of the perpetrator(s) is a means to an end, the murder of unsuspecting and usually innocent people.  The Christian religion, both its Roman Catholic and Protestant interpretations, strongly condemns suicide.  One may die in the attempt to save others;  indeed, this is the story of the Cross of Jesus.  But one must not kill oneself, certainly not in the attempt to murder and cause destruction.  The frequent references by Islamic clerics to suicide murderers as martyrs deserve to be considered more closely.  If Islam is truly a religion in which peace and the love of neighbors are prominent, how are we to look on the repeated resort to suicide and the murder of innocents as a means to an end?

The prolific and often highly uncomfortable Alexandre Solzhenitsyn has provided us, in a huge, two-volume work, Two Centuries Together (in French translation), with data to support Martin Hohmann’s highly criticized comments, or at least the milder, non-anti-Semitic version published initially.  Jews and Russians have a long history together, which Solzhenitsyn traces back to the first appearance of Jews in what later was to become Russia with the exile of Jewish prisoners to the Crimea by the Roman Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 137, after the abortive Jewish rebellion of Bar Kokhba.  Solzhenitsyn’s book is based primarily on Jewish sources and seems to justify his stated intent to be fair and unprejudiced.  Jews were prominent (activists, said Hohmann) in the Bolshevik Revolution and were influential members of the secret police in numbers far exceeding their share in the general population, until the dictator Josef Stalin engaged in a dreadful purge in the closing years of his life.  This is in fact the truth;  is it a truth that should not be mentioned?  Perhaps not, and apparently most certainly not by German politicians of today.  What is its relevance for us today?  Perhaps only to remind us that, as St. Paul wrote, “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).  Even as we acknowledge the disproportionate evil of the Nazi persecutions, we do well to remember that no nation or tribe has clean hands, not the Americans, not the Russians, not even the Jews.  We may and indeed should repent of what has been done in the past, especially of what we ourselves have done, less so of what our ancestry did, but it is far more important to focus on the dignity of all men, women, and children (even unborn ones) as made in the image of God, of equal value in his sight, and to shape our personal actions and our public policies in the light of this great truth.

In 1997, Martin Hohmann, at that time mayor of a small town in Hesse, said that he hoped that one of his virtues was “courage before the royal throne.”  Apparently he has now taken his courage too far, for he is being excluded from his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), because of remarks made about the role of Jews in the Soviet Revolution and the various forms of Soviet secret police — where Jewish officers were quite prominent before Josef Stalin purged them near the end of his personal reign of terror.  Faithful readers of the best newspapers, such as the Vienna Presse and Standard, and International Herald Tribune, have not yet found out exactly what Herr Hohmann said.  There seems to be a kind of escalation in the way his remarks are being described, as now he is said to have compared certain Jews to the Nazis.  (Of course, if Herr Hohmann were an Islamic leader, he could easily get away with even that remark, which we are not sure is what he said.)  Since 1998, Herr Hohmann has been a CDU representative in the Bundestag.  According to a highly critical article in Die Presse (November 11), in the Bundestag he began to stress his favorite theme, that fifty years of reparations, regret, and remorse for the Nazi (and German) atrocities of World War II are enough.  He opposed the building of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a “mark of Cain.”  According to Die Presse, he is a popular speaker in “clearly right-wing circles, which are being watched by the Verfassungsshutz, a German equivalent of the FBI.”

Whatever one thinks of Herr Hohmann, it is evident that the Germans are finally beginning to emerge from the constant posture of self-condemnation and to look at what was done to them, as well as at what they did and tried to do to everyone else.  Jörg Friedrich’s new book, Der Brand (“Fire” or “the Burning”), reports in gruesome detail the tremendous ravages of the air war against German civilians, begun by the R.A.F. and joined by the U.S.A.A.F.  In this wave of attacks, in which firestorms in urban areas were deliberately caused, over 600,000 German civilians were killed and perhaps tens of thousands of unidentified refugees along with them.  Friedrich alleges that Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt were planning to use anthrax bombs against Germany, but changed their minds after an order for half a million 4-pound anthrax bombs had been placed (March 8, 1944) because of the Allied invasion of Europe.  From a non-German perspective, one must point out that the Germans brought it all on themselves, but that does not mean that Allied policies were always justifiable.  As pointed out by the Canadian journalist Braque in Other Losses, the victorious American General Dwight Eisenhower, after V-E Day, changed the status of millions of German prisoners from prisoners of war, protected by the General Convention, to “disarmed enemy soldiers,” protected by nothing.  A recent series on German national television has portrayed the way in which hundreds of thousands of men were herded into barbed-wire compounds, open to the elements, and left virtually to rot for weeks on end.

Again, from a non-German perspective, we do not want the Germans to forget their past, but we can acknowledge that part of that past was terrible suffering, brought on by militarily unnecessary, militarily useless devastation of civilian targets, culminating in the fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945.  (The destruction of Dresden was regularly used by the East German Communist regime as proof of the savage nature of the Western Allies and to temper the horror civilians felt at the treatment at the hands of their Russian conquerors.)  There is no doubt that a growing sense of indignation at Allied atrocities in the war the Germans started is contributing to German criticism of U.S. actions in Iraq.  In the meantime, Lieutenant General Meinhard Günzel, chief of German Special Forces, was summarily fired for writing a letter in which he praised Hohmann for “an excellent speech…of a type seldom heard in this nation.”  So much for General Boykin for his remarks about Satan being his chief enemy in the war in Iraq.  Of course, we must acknowledge that Herr Hohmann had already blackened his reputation by criticizing “false, cowardly tolerance” of homosexuality.  During World War II there were posters warning, “Loose Talk Sinks Ships.”  No ships are going down, so far, but loose talk seems to sink politicians and generals.

Vienna.  According to a European poll reported by Dalia Dassa Kaye in the International Herald Tribune for Saturday-Sunday, November 8-9, Europeans rank Israel as the greatest threat to peace in the world, ahead of Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.  Miss Kaye notes that Europeans, to the extent that it can be generalized, tend to be sympathetic to the Arabs and experience growing frustration with Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians.  However, she notes, this poll exaggerates and misinterprets European views towards Israel and the Middle East.  Other polls show that Europeans view the military conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as extremely serious, but do not suggest that Israel itself is the problem.

The European Commission, the IHT reports, did not address the issue of Islamic fundamentalism, which more than 80 percent of Europeans look on as an “extremely important” or “important” threat to peace.  The European Commission poll also did not address the potential threat to world stability caused by the Arab world’s “democracy deficit” and economic stagnation.

Newspapers in Vienna, so much closer to the Middle East than North America is, produce much fuller and perhaps more reliable information on world affairs than most American papers, with the possible exception of the magisterial New York Times.  The two foremost Viennese papers, Die Presse and Der Standard, give more useful information on world affairs in 30-odd pages than most American papers, even metropolitan ones such as the Chicago Tribune, do in 200.  On November 8, a conference of the Institute for the Study of Man produced some fireworks when Adam Michnik, a former Solidarity fighter in Poland, now editor of the Gazeta Wyborcza, demanded that Muslim authorities stop trying to brush aside the acts of their own extremists as “isolated incidents.”  This was Adam Michnik’s reaction to a speech by Imam Abduljali Sayid of Brighton (England), in which Sayid had denounced the “rotting away of values” in the Western world, demanding at the same time an end to the ghettoizing of Muslims in the West.  It should be evident that the presence of activist Muslim minorities in the West makes it difficult if not impossible for Christians to develop a coherent program for dealing with the problems caused by Christian-Muslim tensions.  The Muslims have their own programs; the generic Christians of the West, often Christian in name only, have none.

Prof. Charles Taylor of Northwestern University, who gave the keynote speech, rejected Samuel Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations and warned that looking at the world in that way could produce a dangerously self-fulfilling prophecy.  According to Prof. Taylor, the conflicts begin not between civilizations but within a given civilization; he claimed that the rise of Osama Bin Laden was evidence of a conflict that began in the Arab world.  From one perspective, this is rather a truism; one could assert that the rise of George Bush is evidence of a conflict within the American order.  Taylor also criticized the restriction of civil rights in America, which reminded him of McCarthyism in the 1950’s.  He offered the opinion that the war with terror should be only 10 percent a war and 90 percent a forging of alliances with the Muslims, whose religion had been kidnapped by the terrorists.  He asserted that the events of September 11 had led the U.S. administration to the “potentially disastrous decision to go it alone.”

• On the weekend of the Vienna conference, the French existentialist Albert Camus would have been 90 years old.  Camus (who was born in Algeria), like the better-known Jean-Paul Sartre, castigated “bourgeois morality” as hypocritical and saw the Algerian War, which devastated his homeland, as a consequence of hypocritical injustice on the French side, which was then outdone by violent injustice on the side of the Algerian rebels, the FLN.  Unlike the vehemently anti-Christian Sartre, Camus was open to the possibility of a truly honest Christian faith and reportedly was preparing to be baptized when he lost his life in a motorcycle accident. 

• Are you interested in the editor’s summer course in Germany?  Please call (704) 366-5066.

Notes on Sources

For “Spasms of Anti-Semitism in Europe,” see A. Solzhenitsyn, Deux Siecles Ensemble, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 2001-03), esp. II, pp. 49ff., 423ff., et. passim.