THE TRAP OF COLONIAL WAR

Leon, Spain  —  “The trap of colonial war has snapped shut on the invaders of Iraq.”  These words by Ignacio Ramonet were written before the United Nations gave President Bush his tremendous diplomatic victory on June 8, when the Security Council voted unanimously for Resolution 1546, approving his plan for the transfer of power in Iraq to the new interim government.  Perhaps this transfer of power will bring the end of what Ramonet calls the trap of colonial war, at least in Iraq as it emerges into new independence, but it is likely that it will continue to cripple the Bush administration and the Pentagon, hampering his reelection campaign.  According to documents obtained by the Washington Post, as reported in the Spanish newspaper El País, Madrid, it was the U.S. commander in Iraq, General Richardo Sanchez himself, who authorized the use of something resembling torture of Iraqi prisoners.  According to the reports cited in El País, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners in Guantanomo in January of 2002, and at least five other means of “pressure” in April of 2003.  Most of these techniques fall short of actual torture such as was common in the days of Saddam Hussein, but they violate the Geneva Convention and go beyond the standard methods of interrogation of the U.S. Army.  According to a list of techniques drawn up September 10 by General Sanchez’s authority, if not his personal command, no prisoner was to be subjected to “inhuman or maliciously humiliating treatment,” but extremely loud music, withdrawal of heat in winter and of cooling in the summer, and the imposition of “pressure postures,” all were explicitly permitted without the need to obtain official approval for each use.  The revelation of the specific responsibility of General Sanchez and Secretary Rumsfeld will certainly be exploited to the full by the Democratic opposition and by the media sources that support them.

This is what M. Ramonet means by “the trap.”  It sprang shut on the French forces during the war in Algeria, at that time officially a part of France, on the British in Kenya, the Belgians in the Congo, the Portuguese in Portuguese Guinea, and it probably would have caught the Federal forces occupying the defeated Confederacy if the beaten Confederates had resorted to guerrilla warfare.  The Nazi occupiers of Czechoslovakia, Poland, parts of Russia, and of France were quick to resort to cruel and extreme measures against guerrilla violence, and we were furious in our condemnation.  Unfortunately, we Americans must now understand how this happens, even though still in much less cruel and inhumane ways, under our command.  We must never accept the French proverb, “tout comprender, c’est tout pardoner,” to understand all is to forgive all; instead, we must use our understanding of such vicious behavior by our own men (and, alas, of at least one of our women) to appreciate the nature and the causes of the terrorist violence which elicits it.  Our prison cruelty is a symptom of our increasing frustration at our inability to catch the greatest leaders and to stop the terrorist violence.  In Iraq, as elsewhere, for example in French Algeria, terrorists often direct their violence against the innocent in order to provoke ever more vicious reprisals against their own innocent people and thus to turn isolated acts of terrorism into a mass insurrection against the occupiers or rulers whom they want to destroy.

Know Thy Enemy, Know Thyself

It is becoming evident to all who are not blind to reality or who, because of a strong commitment to misguided opinions, refuse to see it that there is a transcultural, transnational, even transreligious dimension to the conflict into which we were thrown by the events of 9-11.  This past March, the Spanish also suffered atrocious terrorist violence, for which they too have a symbolic shortcut, M-11.  On the one hand, the Spanish immediately made a pusillanimous response promising the prompt withdrawal of their troops from Iraq, eliminating one source of provocation.   On the other hand, they immediately engaged in vigorous investigation, pursuit, and apprehension of at least some of those responsible, diminishing the sense of violation and impotence on the part of their own people.  Americans on the whole, from the high to the low, fail to grasp the nature or the scope of the conflict in which we have been involved, for the reason that we have yet to recognize, much less to know, the nature of the conflict and of our enemies.  Behind this failure, there is a deeper cause, namely, our failure to know ourselves and our own society.  Under the illusion of perpetual national goodness, we cannot acknowledge our own errors.  When they are pointed out to us, we react with indignation.  Through our failure or refusal to acknowledge our own crimes, we find ourselves caught in what Laurens van der Post called “the poison of shame.”

Two Russian exiles in the West, Alekzander Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Viazkovsky, said it clearly: men have forgotten God, systematically and with government action, increasingly prodded by the courts, especially but not only the U.S. Supreme Court.  Forgetting God, we forget our own human nature, created by Him, and increasingly commit crimes against it.  Because they are crimes against nature and against God, and because God made us for us to know Him, we cannot entirely conceal them from ourselves.  We acquire a dim sense of shame, a subconscious awareness of being both finite and culpable.  Because we cannot and will not see the truth about ourselves — it would be too painful — we cannot see the truth about our present enemies.

Let us look for a moment at a part, before turning to the whole.  We have chosen as a nation, or at least as governments, to tolerate, approve, and now bless by a travesty of marriage, a union established by God, the crimen contra naturam, i.e., the crime against nature, which we call homosexuality, an “alternative life-style.”  There is no alternative nature, no nature other then the nature created by God.  Throughout human history, individuals, at times whole societies, have transgressed human nature, by cannibalism, human sacrifice, bestiality, incest, and homosexuality.  Those societies that have established such crimes as policy have not endured.  As the proverb says, “Only God truly forgives, man sometimes forgives, but nature never forgives.”  Do we delude ourselves into thinking that we — America, the West — can with impunity forget God, forgive ourselves, denying that we have offended, and be forgiven by nature?  We can do this only by being deliberately and systematically blind, and it is this blindness that makes us odious to our enemies and impotent to understand their rage.

The groups and the people who oppose us are primarily adherents of Islam, to which they adhere with greater fervor and loyalty than the nations of the West adhere to Christianity.  We have given a kind of quasi-divine authority to the U.S. Constitution, turning it not merely into an idol, but into a dumb idol, and giving to its hierophants, our “justices” and lesser judges, the power to speak for it in ways the Founding Fathers never imagined.  If the Muslims of the Middle East despise us, as so many do, it is not because of our freedom, as we foolishly assert.  It is because of this idolatry, which they sense even if they cannot name it, and because of what it lets us do — celebrate crimes against nature which they abhor.

Many recognize that to put woman by design into combat is to violate nature.  We Americans cannot see it or dare not declare it if we do.  We cannot see it, much less say it.  Women are no longer by nature the mothers of the future, for abortion denies the future once begun — over 40 million individual futures in the United States alone.  Homosexual “marriage” declares that there will be no future lives for those who follow this unnatural course, unless as exceptions they are produced by other than natural means.  We think that we must put our women into combat, because we have adopted, contra naturam, the lie that there are no differences between them and men.  The death in combat of a few women, or of many, is of no concern; we do not worry about the babies they will never bear, because we systematically kill far more before birth by abortion.  That we use women as prison guards to mock and humiliate naked Iraqis only illustrates to them the far more pervasive reality that we mock God and violate nature.  Because our faiths are not important to us, at least not on a national scale, we cannot understand the religious loathing that many Muslims — not all, for some have moved here, and some have been converted — feel for us.

Mao’s Fish

It is this loathing which contributes to the effect of what we may call the Maoist fish.  As the late Chairman Mao said, the guerrilla lives in the people as the fish lives in the water.  The forces of government cannot find him, because the people refuse to identify him or disclose his location.  They admire him and loathe the governing powers, which they find oppressive.  It is for us an indigestible truth that the terrorist moves among the Muslims as the fish moves in the water.  They may not all approve of him, they may detest him, he may even have harmed them, but they fear him, and they loathe us.  They do not loathe Christians as such, or Jews as such, and perhaps, if they live among us, they will not loathe us at all.  They have not forgotten God in the Arab world, at least not as they understand him.  Until as a people we again remember God and honor the nature that he has created, they will continue to loathe us.  Despite threats and indifference to offers of rewards, the terrorists will continue to move among the Muslims in Iraq — and perhaps elsewhere — as the fish moves in the sea.

Other Aspects

In his essay, Ignacio Ramonet writes, “For the soldiers on the ground, the occupation of Iraq is being transformed into a descent into hell.”  His analysis of a colonial conflict does not resemble our occupation of Iraq in all details, perhaps not even in substance, but it does give room for thought.  It is characterized, Ramonet writes, “by the arrogance of the occupiers, by their conviction of belonging to a superior breed (more civilized, more advanced), by disdain for the colonized people, and at times by the refusal to admit that they belong to the human species.  This ‘colonial fatuity’ leads the occupiers, in the name of a ‘superior and sacred mission’ (to defend the Good against the Evil, protect civilization, install democracy) to make disproportionate use of force.”  Thus, he says, after the murder of four Americans in Faluja in April, followed by the desecration of their bodies, the American forces did not hesitate to bomb residential quarters in the town, causing some 600 civilian deaths.

In mid-June the congressional commission investigating the September 11th attacks concluded that there was no connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, thus undermining one of President Bush’s arguments for the war on Iraq.  The fact that he had congressional approval for the invasion, euphemistically called “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” is seldom or never mentioned:  it is “Bush’s war.”  President George W. Bush might have done better to imitate his father, who secured legal and theological approval of the justness of his cause before launching “Desert Storm,” the Gulf War, or the First Iraq War.

When President Clinton launched his “air campaign” against what remained of Yugoslavia, also with questionable justification, there was no similar hue and cry in Congress and the media, nor is there any congressional commission investigating the aggression against Serbia for the benefit of the Muslims of Kosovo.  If war is deemed necessary, and the decision is made to wage it, the possibility of a successful outcome is hampered by such constant carping, if not destroyed.  The editor of this Report was not at all convinced of the justification of our second Iraq war, but the majority in both houses of Congress voted “yes.”  The ongoing efforts of many in Congress, despite its Republican majority, and in the media to denigrate the President, the administration, and the military leadership threaten to make a successful victory and peace in Iraq impossible.  Sadly, it appears that many are willing to sacrifice our cause in Iraq and on the world stage for the sake of the victory of their cause and their party in the upcoming national elections.

Fraternité, Egalité, Mais Moins de Liberté  

In favor of the growing homosexual power in France, the government of the Fifth Republic seems to be altering the old slogan “Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité” to “Fraternity, Equality, but Less Liberty.”  A law proposed by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin on June 8 would severely penalize remarks hostile to homosexuals and to members of other races.  In the United States, the opposition of one or a few has been able to drive prayer out of schools and most public places and to take the words “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance.  Would the objections of a few unreconstructed Southerners be able to remove the word “indivisible” as well?  Logically, yes, but practically, no, because the sensitivity of atheists and agnostics must be protected, but that of reactionary Southern patriots will not be.

The recent initiative of Premier Raffarin against homophobic and racist speech would limit the traditional freedom of speech that the French have enjoyed.  It was sparked by an incident May 29 in which a certain Gerard M. (his last name was not published) was called a sale pédé, roughly translated, “dirty fag,” dragged from his car and beaten, but not so badly that he could not climb back into his car and drive to the police station and to the hospital.  At the same time, the leading French daily, Le Monde, reported that anti-Semitic attacks increased almost 50 percent in the first half of 2004, apparently stimulated, Le Monde maintained, by Israeli acts against Palestinians.  In this roundabout way, the newspaper got around to revealing that most, perhaps all, were the work of young North African Muslims.  Freedom of speech is not prized in North Africa.  It will be a shame if atrocious speech and acts of vandalism by young North Africans and cries of sale pédé, coupled with beatings, cause the extinction of liberty in la République Française.

No to the Christian Heritage

In what is probably a related incident, the commission working to draw up a European constitution is rejecting the proposal to refer to Europe’s “Christian heritage,” substituting “religious heritages.”  The desire to include a reference to Christianity was supported by Poland, Italy, Portugal, and Lithuania, among others, and also by Vatican City.  The substitution of “religious heritages” for “Christian” is an historical fraud, for since the early Middle Ages Europe as a whole has had no other heritage.  This refusal clearly results from the widespread European rejection of the Christian faith, so it is honest in a way.  It would be more honest to leave out the reference to “religions” altogether.  For those of us, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, who take our faith seriously being merely “religious” is not an adequate alternative.

NO DIGA MENTIRAS  

“Don’t tell lies” is a line that occurs in a children’s song, otherwise in English, that was often played in this editor’s home when his children were small.  For some reason, while in Mexico, that line occurred to him in reading a report of President Bush’s comments on the occasion of the 2004 March for Life in Washington, D.C.  Those of us who know and admire the depth and genuineness of the President’s spiritual and moral convictions can hardly help wondering what political pressures and advice seem to make him confine his remarks to half truths.  He knows well that the child in its mother’s womb is a human being, and he wants to protect it.  Apparently, a judge of the Ninth Federal Circuit Court, Phyllis Hamilton, does not, for in the late spring she used her invincible judicial power to set aside the law against “intact dilation and extraction,” i.e., partial birth abortion, which Mr. Bush gladly signed after his predecessor, President Clinton, had vetoed two previous laws.

Whatever the President says, even if it represents the will of almost all of the people, cannot prevail against the power of one or a few judges and justices to make the U.S. Constitution say whatever they want it to say.  Our constitution is short, very short compared to the proposed European constitution with its 455 articles.  The European constitution, as proposed, goes into great detail, prohibiting capital punishment, Part II, Art. 2 (but not abortion, of course), torture, Art. 4; cloning, Art. 3; and extradition of accused criminals to any country where the death penalty is possible, Art. 19.  In spite of the great detail, several articles leave themselves open to interpretation: the right of minors to express their opinions freely, Art. 23, and the guarantee of total equality of men and women in every sphere, Art. 23 and 24.  Does this mean that women must be used in combat?  Logically, it would.

The newly admitted nations of Eastern Europe had a very poor turnout, around 25 percent, in the Europe-wide parliamentary elections held June 8-12.  Elsewhere in Europe the turnout never exceeded 50 percent, and the current leaders — mostly Socialists — were rebuked by low numbers for their candidates.  Apparently there is growing apprehensiveness about the possibility of the emergence of a Europe-wide “nanny state” with control of everything.

A PRIVATE AFFAIR  

Henley-on-Thames, England.  The seven days from June 28 to July 4 witnessed one of the most unusual festivals of amateur sports in the world today.  The Olympic Games are now all but totally professional, but not the Henley Royal Regatta.  In the nineteenth century, a group of individuals, now known as the Stewards, provided a trophy and invited amateur crews to compete for it.  Now there are more than a dozen trophies, and crews from pair-oars to eights compete, as well as single, double, and quadruple sculls.  (In sculling boats, each oarsman has two oars, called sculls, while in the other boats each has only one.)  The Stewards take over the longest straight stretch of the Thames River, 1-5/16 miles, now called “the Henley distance,” when used for races elsewhere.  It is slightly longer than the 2000 meter stretches common in international competition. Typically, in Henley everything — or almost everything, except the athletes’ sweat — is different.

The Stewards set the rules and qualifications for each event. Some are for younger participants, some for schools, and a few for women, but basically it is still a male environment. There is a women’s regatta over the same course one week earlier.

The HRR is unique in its willingness to go its own way without regard to international committees, European championships, or even to the Olympic committee.  The regatta has its own ways of doing things:  boats race two at a time, unlike other regattas, and because of the large number of entries, this means that the regatta keeps moving.  On the first day, races start within a few minutes of each other, with a second race starting before the first has completed the course.  Instead of announcing times as in other events, e.g. at 250 meters, 500 meters, and the like, natural markers are used:  “the end of the island,”  “Fawley,” “Remenham Club,” and “the Enclosures.”  The Enclosures refers to the Stewards Enclosure, reserved for members and their guests, and to the large “General Enclosure” closer to the start of the course.

Pairings are by lot;  there is no seeding.  This can lead to awkward results, as when two crews which have crossed the Atlantic to row at Henley meet each other on the first day and one is knocked out.  This happened to Brown University when it met Georgetown’s lightweight crew on the first day of racing this year.  But there is no appeal;  the lot is cast, and the crews must race as it dictates.  It is an unusual event indeed when a body of Stewards can invite crews from anywhere and everywhere to come and race in front of its members in their Enclosure.  Entry badges for members cost at present time 110 pounds sterling (close to $200) for members and their personal guests; additional badges cost 141 pounds for a single badge for all five days, or over $250.

Whether in the Stewards’ Enclosure, the General Enclosure, on the water in boats (the mooring places have to be rented), or on the banks, tens of thousands of people come to watch hundreds of oarsmen and oarswomen compete for cups and medals and to share in the almost vanished phenomenon of amateur athletics.  Those who have seen the movie Chariots of Fire have seen what amateur sports were like in the 1928 Olympic Games.  Those who come to the Henly Royal Regatta will experience one of the few places where top-quality amateurism survives in the 21st century.

Poor Little Greenbacks  

Americans visiting Europe this summer are in for some unpleasant shocks.  With the exception of the Swiss franks, which are printed on good paper with excellent designs and which actually have some hard metal under them, it is mere good will on which the British pound, the European euro, and — alas! — the American dollar are based.  Americans who remember when the old silver dollar made out of precious metal was still in circulation were hardly pleased by the imitation silver-successor dollar, hardly distinguishable from the quarter.  It’s somewhat gold-tinted successor is hardly better.  Both of the dollar coins, as well as the old greenback, look rather sad compared to the British five-, ten-, and twenty-pound notes, not to mention the euro notes.  The lowest denomination euro note, five, is currently worth about $6.25.  The lowest denomination pound note is also five, worth about nine U.S. dollars.  One pound is available only as a coin, and so is the one euro.  Each of these little base metal slugs is more valuable than the dollar bill, 1.25 times for the euro, 1.80 for the pound.  When we think that the bi-metallic two-pound coin is getting close to the value of a five-dollar bill, we see the long, slow decline of the U.S. currency symbolically represented.

What this symbolism suggests is demonstrated more forcefully in practice.  A single euro ($1.25 today) will buy a local newspaper, but it takes ¤2.30 to buy one day’s  International Herald Tribune.  A cup of coffee in an ordinary cafe costs  two euros or more.  In Britain, it will probably cost two pounds, or close to four dollars.  At the Henley Royal Regatta (see above) each day’s program costs £2.50 or $4.50 — $22.50 for five days’ racing.  And all of it — the pound that used to be sterling, the dollar, and the new euro — is fiction, based on the good faith of the issuing nation.  No one has used the expression “Sound as a dollar!” in a long time. 

DON’T YOU WANT A NEW CRUSADE? THEN LAY OFF ON THE JIHAD  

The terrible situation that confronts our American and allied forces in Iraq, as well as those of the new interim Iraqi government, cannot be mastered unless it is understood, and not merely what it means in Iraq, but for what it means in the entire Middle East, indeed, in the whole world.  No matter what President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and their advisors and associates do, the problem that they face has a dimension that so far they refuse to acknowledge, if in fact they understand it.  There is a religious dimension to the Iraqi insurgency and to terrorism in general.  The fact that British and American leaders, soldiers, and our population as a whole are not much moved by religious motivation must not delude us into failing to recognize the degree to which the insurgents are in fact dominated by religious considerations — perhaps not the best or the ideal of what Islam teaches, and we hope not, but religious in any event.

President Bush and other leaders do not want the American public aroused to some kind of a fury of religious indignation,  and quite properly so.   The difficulty is that we are being goaded and prodded by people who readily proclaim the religious basis of their assaults and atrocities, however mistaken they may be in claiming Islamic authorization for what they are doing.  How many television broadcasts of American, Bulgarian, or Filipino men kneeling before hooded and armed terrorists under a banner in Arabic which hardly one American in a thousand can read, threatening, and then carrying out a brutal murder by decapitation, before sentiments in the United States and Western Europe reach the boiling point?  Some Americans, by a twisted kind of reasoning, want to blame the murders, explosions, and other acts of violence not on the perpetrators, but the victims, crying pitifully that we have made the aggressors angry.  This sort of denial of reality and self-accusation will not go on indefinitely.  There are things that need to be done before the boiling point is reached.

If it is not the essence of Islam to demand a jihad against the peoples and nations that are not in the dar al-islam, or in other words who are in the dar al-harb “house of war,” if Islam properly understood does not justify, much less encourage, the atrocities that are being committed in its name, its leaders must tell us.  It must be the real leaders in the Islamic countries, not the occasional Muslim in a Western university.  They must not only tell us, they must tell their terrorists. It is not enough for Condoleezza Rice, or even President Bush himself, to repeat “peaceful religion.”  The religion’s own leaders must tell their people that they are not earning the favor of their God, but courting his judgment, and do so often enough and loudly enough to make the injured nations of the West hear and believe.

And the Christians

The Christians of the West, for our part, must begin to recognize that we are not detested for our freedom, nor even for our wealth, but for our glaring failure to live up to the ideas that our religions proclaim.  Only when we reach the point of reflection, repentance, and change will we be able to meet a religiously motivated aggression on equal terms.  We must be people of integrity and moral fervor, or we may be violent, but we shall not be brave.  The terrorists will not respect craven submissiveness, but their peoples can and will respect bravery.  The way to peace with the Muslim world is by the recovery of our own moral fibre and our own courage to speak and to act.  Cowards inspire violence, but brave men and women can face it head on.

Cowardice will not enable us to evade threats. Bravery may enable us not merely to face those who threaten us, but to convince them that a peace of the brave is possible and preferable to the generalized, perhaps nuclear, war that constant acts of aggression may inspire.  A nation that winks at partial birth abortions and honors the judges who keep them, that cannot tell the difference between men and women, or remember that marriage is not just a civil institution, but part of the Creator's order, cannot be brave. Government will not change us, at least not sufficiently to make the terrorists no longer believe that we deserve whatever they may do to us.  Looking at a scene of debauchery in the Rome of which he was emperor, Tiberius (42 B.C. - A.D. 17) wrote, “It is beyond the power of government to make people behave well.  When respect for the gods has withered, when families are in disarray, licentiousness prevails. The secret impulses, which men subdue in decent and well-ordered society, are openly acknowledged.”  These words were ascribed to the emperor in a fictional autobiography by Allan Massie,  Tiberius (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990).  Whether Tiberius said them or not, they certainly applied to the Rome of his day.  If we substitute “God” for “the gods,” they apply all too well to modern America.  There will be no “peace of the brave,” indeed no peace at all, for us until we deal with our own moral disarray.     

The current presidential election campaign threatens to exhaust itself in dealing with trifles — atrocious trifles, serious trifles, perhaps, but not the heart of the matter.   To let one thing stand for many:  the fact that Americans are in doubt as to whether marriage is for members of opposite sexes or of the same sex is an indication of our moral confusion, as is our persistent obtuse bloodiness on abortion.  Prescription drug benefits may come and go, but if we do not recover a sense of respect for God and His created order, if we keep promoting the lie that the Constitution forbids it, then we shall richly deserve what will happen to us at the hands of people who take their religion seriously.

IN ADDITION TO WHICH  

• On June 30, the Daily Telegraph, which calls itself “Britain’s Best-Selling Quality Newspaper,” astonished this American newspaper reader by reporting at length and with great enthusiasm on the success of an operation to help a woman rendered infertile by chemotherapy to conceive and bear her own child.  In 2003, the patient had strips of ovarian tissue, frozen in advance of the chemotherapy, thawed and implanted near the surviving but defunct ovary.  Soon menstruation began again, and she was able to conceive a child with her husband in the usual time-honored way.  The procedure, supervised by Prof. Jacques Donnez of Louvain University in Belgium, differed from something already done by Dr. Kutluk Oktay of Cornell University, in that Dr. Oktay proceeded to fertilize an egg in vitro and then implant it (p. 1).

• In the same issue, the Telegraph reported with approval that more and more pregnant British teenagers are choosing to bear a child rather than to have an abortion, especially, the article added, women from “the less privileged classes.”  The news article went on, in a style not so familiar to American readers, to note that unplanned and unintended babies were often welcomed and well-treated after actually being born.

• In the same issue, the Telegraph reported that Tom Forrest, a Scottish bed-and-breakfast innkeeper, denied a room with a double bed to two male homosexuals.  Mr. Forrest told them, “We do not have a problem with your personal sexual deviation;  that is up to you.  You are welcome to our twin room, but we will not condone your perversion.”  Stephen Nock, one of the men, said that he and his boyfriend were “very upset.”  Would an American newspaper have printed Mr. Forrest’s words “deviation” and “perversion” without speaking of them as “homophobic” or even “hate speech”?

• The British Parliament has passed laws to forbid children younger than sixteen to enter pet shops or to purchase pets, even goldfish.  At the same time, while pets are being protected from children, children are being protected from corporal punishment by their parents.  Such laws already exist in Scandinavia and Germany.  The House of Lords added an amendment to the edict that parents may “smack” children provided that there is no reddening of the skin.  No doubt soon a Special Police Anti-Reddening-of-Skin Force will be set up to deal with parents who go a bit too far, or whose children's skin reddens at the mere thought of being smacked.

• On July 8, BBC Television broadcast a debate on the abortion issue in Britain.  There is a growing acknowledgement in British medical and legal circles that abortion kills a baby and that it should be protected to the extent possible.  On July 9, the Times (London) argued that abortion should be limited to an earlier period in pregnancy than the 24 weeks now permitted, as it is increasingly evident that infants are viable before that time (p. 15).  Pro-abortion forces charged that the move is simply a further effort to reduce a woman’s right to choose, but now the British media are not buying it.  Both Senators Kerry and Edwards, and indeed virtually the whole national Democratic party, want abortion to remain available up to the moment of birth, which British medical and legal authorities consider tantamount to infanticide or, more roughly said, to murder.  It is hard to understand how the extreme feminists have so much control over a party which in the past has prided itself on defending the defenseless.

• In Austria, the land that was once 90 percent Protestant before the Hapsburg emperors unleashed a powerful and violent Counter-Reformation, Roman Catholicism is now the default religion. In the month of July the church was wracked by a scandal of homosexual activity in the St. Pölten seminary.  Bishop Krenn has dismissed the charges that seminarians and faculty are misbehaving with words such as “youthful fooling around.”  It has never been easy for young men to dedicate themselves to celibacy — which also excludes “fooling around” — and in an era where sex seems to be the dominant preoccupation, it must be harder today.  Without endorsing celibacy as a requirement for the ministry, as Catholicism does, one hopes that the bishops can put their house in order without suffering the terrible lessons of money and reputation that occurred in Boston and elsewhere in the U.S.A.

• As often happens when a sex scandal hits the media, the scandal at the Roman Catholic seminary at St. Pölten in Austria, mentioned above, is expanding.  Bishop Kurt Krenn of St. Pölten, a theological conservative, may be forced to resign, like Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston.  Austrian police have said that they found “pornographic representations of minors and so-called violent pornography” on the seminary’s computers.  Pope John Paul II has appointed a special prosecutor.

Notes on Sources

For “The Trap of Colonial Wars,” see Le Monde Diplo-matique, June 2004, pp. 1, 12-15, and El País (Madrid), June 13, p. 6, June 17, p.1; for “Fraternité, Egalité, mais moins de Liberté,” see Le Monde (Paris) June 10, pp. 1 ff, and June 11, pp. 1 ff and El País, June 13, pp. 6, 7.