The Evil of Religious Hate: Why Can't We Just Get Along?

 England and/or Britain ruled Ireland for over 700  years.  The Irish were their closest brothers in terms of culture or ethnicity.  The British, however, were the most brutal to their Irish brothers; ruling the island with an iron hand.  After the Reformation Penal laws were passed against Catholics in Ireland banning all forms of Catholic worship.  The British were so brutal to the Irish that in the 19th century they allowed the Potato famine.  Over one million Irish perished.  The British Empire, at the time the dominant world power, could have easily stopped the famine but chose to let their Irish brothers die instead.  This is one of the best examples of man's inhumanity to man.  King Henry VIII started this avalanche of hate.  If you study his history, it's not hard to figure out that he was probably clinically insane.  Killing his closest advisors just because he could, as he did to the brilliant Sir Thomas More; two of his wives and many others. Yet the British followed his insanity as if it was handed down by God.  Over 500 years after the crazy Henry VIII, his legacy lives on in Britain.  Catholics are still second class citizens.  Although the monarchy has been defanged, the sentiment started by Henry continues.

On our trip to Ireland in 2011 we had a terrific bus driver who told us Irish stories and played Irish music on our journey.  Some of the stories were so compelling that it brought many of us to tears, especially after hearing the song, such as "The Rose of Tralee."  Stories of people not being able to fish or find other sources of food.  Stories of priests risking their lives by saying Mass in hiding.  You keep asking the question, why?  Why were people so cruel to each other as the British to the Irish?  The short answer is religion.  But why must religion make you hate your brother?  This question has no short answer.  It is a sad tale of our human condition.  

So the question, for me, is why does Northern Ireland choose to stay with its oppressor of old and not join the free Irish state?  Again, religion comes to mind.  Catholics and Protestants.  Both Christians, both follow the same Bible so why the hate?  To this day the British still consider their Catholic brothers and sisters as some sort of enemy, or second class citizens.  When the British Prime Minister was Tony Blair - one of my favorite politicians of all time; he wanted to convert to Catholicism but had to wait to do it until he left office because you cannot be a Catholic and be the British Prime Minister.  Is this insane or what?  Up to 1960, if you were Catholic in the United States you were looked upon as not desirable to hold high office.  

Today we have the Muslim problem with 9/11 and the war on terrorism.  Even inside Islam you have inner struggles and hate among the Sunnis and the Shiites.  Why?  As someone suggested in the 1990s:  Can we just get along?  

A House Built on Sand: The fall of the Soviet Union

"But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."  Matthew 7:26

Just finished reading a fine book, "Collapse the Fall of the Soviet Union" by Vladislav M. Zubok, about the shocking collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.  I was a witness to this historic event.  I never imagined that a giant like the Soviet Union would fall in my lifetime.  I recall, in the 1960s, there was a hysteria about the US being attacked by the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons.  People worried about it on a daily basis.  At the suggestion of President Kennedy, many had underground shelters, preparing for it; it was a scary time.  The leader of the Soviet Union until 1964 was Nikita Khrushchev, the very evil looking and threatening person. He threatened to destroy the US from within.  Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis?  The Soviets were threatening.  They came within 90 miles of our shores. They were on the march.

As most events, they don't happen in a vacuum.  The Soviet Union was started after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the World War I.  It lasted 73 years.  The reasons are many and varied and it takes a book such as the one mentioned to explain it in detail.  Suffice it to say that Socialism and Communism have been proven to be a bankrupt system.  This book gives detailed analysis of how it developed.  Not only for the tyrannical rule and the suppression of its people but because basic economics just do not work well in such a system.  As the book describes, the communists had no idea how economics work.  The Soviet Union was a deck of cards waiting for the wind to blow them down.  

Many have speculated, and rightly so, in my view, that President Reagan and his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) had a lot to do with the fall of the Soviets; the author does not share this belief.  However, the seeds of its own destruction had been present since 1918.  By the mid 1980s the Soviet economy was in shambles.  They could not compete with the US; not militarily and certainly not economically. The Nobel laureate, and great American economist, Milton Friedman explains why a free market is ideal. Click here for this short answer (three minutes).  In short, free markets operate the best and are more efficient.  In order to have free markets you need freedom.  The Soviet Union had none of these, so the fall was very predictable.

The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, recognized that the Soviet Union was nearly bankrupt and could not stand on its own economically.  He was a committed communist and follower of Vladimir Lenin.  He proposed changing the Soviet economy into a free market economy.  He could not make it happen.  He proposed giving the 16 Soviet republics more autonomy and freedom.  Once he did this it opened a Pandora's box.  All the republics wanted to be free and independent.  He could not keep the genie in the bottle. Finally, in the fall of 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

With the Russian war on Ukraine that is currently going on, you get a glimpse of the Russian designs on Ukraine from before the fall of the Soviet Union.  The evil Vladimir Putin has been planning on the rape of Ukraine since he took power in 1998.  Written by a Russian insider, the book is a compelling story, with much drama and personal sacrifice by many who took part.  Highly recommended for history buffs.

No Pasaràn

 Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine by the Russians, I posted a comment on my Facebook page about the world needing to come to the aid of the Ukrainians.  A relative of mine from Italy posted a response to the effect that he did not believe that war was the answer and that the Russian people need to decide who leads them.  In other words, the usual hackneyed call of "war is not the answer."  Well, I agree, war is never the answer.  I participated in a war in Vietnam in the 1960s.  I know first hand what war is.  So what do you do when some hoodlums break into your house with guns with the intent of killing you and your family and taking your property?  Do you just say, I'm against war and violence?  What did the Europeans do when they were attacked by Adolf Hitler in World War II?  Do you not defend yourself?

In an interview with CNN and a piece in the Italian Daily newspaper, Corriere Della Sera, former Russian Oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, explains the mind set of Vladimir Putin, the insane tyrant of Russia.  Khodorkovsky explains that Putin only understands force, negotiations or diplomacy are useless. He knows Putin like no one else.  He was a close associate of his until he displeased him somehow.  He was arrested and spent 10 years in a Russian prison.  

Putin is not an isolated case.  Diplomacy was tried by the Europeans in 1938 with Hitler when the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proclaimed "peace in our time" when they let him have part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland.  Hitler invaded the rest of Europe shortly thereafter.  Was "war is not the answer" then? There are dozens of other examples.  In short, "war is not the answer" is a fool's response to violence.

Before Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte tried to conquer all of Europe for France.  Should the Europeans have responded with "war is not the answer?  There comes a time when mindless phrases such as "war is not the answer" cannot be used because it represents wishful thinking and not based on reality.

Land Transfers that Boggle the Mind

 

Among the most bizarre land transfers in history is the transfer, after World War II, of what was the capital of East Prussia, Konigsberg, which was renamed by Stalin to Kaliningrad after his good buddy, Kalinin.  Stalin, as you may know, went nuts in renaming cities after himself, such as Stalingrad, and other Communists of the Russian revolution, like Leningrad, after his hero, Vladimir Lenin.  

                                                

 

After Germany’s defeat in WW II, the Potsdam Conference, which included three of the victorious allies, Russia, UK and the United States, decided to give this city of about 500,000 to the Russians, giving in to a demand from Stalin.  What is more bizarre is that this city is not contiguous with Russia but wedged between Poland and Lithuania.  This gives Russia a huge advantage of stirring trouble there with Poland and the Baltic states.  This has recently come home to roost after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022.  The Baltic states stopped having inter commerce transportation in and out of Kaliningrad.  This enraged the Russians who now threaten the Baltic States.  One of the threats, as reported in the Italian daily, Corriere Della Sera on 22 June 2022 was that Russia would declare the seceding of the Baltic states from the Soviet Union in 1991 as null and void.  Of course, this would obviously mean a Russian invasion of the states.  Play with fire and you’re sure to get burned, sooner or later.

 

The Catholic Church Social Teaching on Capitalism vs Socialism

Ask five Catholics what is Catholic Social Teaching, and you’ll get six different answers.  Similarly, what is “social justice"?  Different people will have different answers.  In this piece we will concentrate on the Catholic Church’s social teaching on economics, and specifically, socialism and capitalism.  In the last 150 years three different Popes have written encyclicals addressing the issue:  Pope Leo XIII in 1891 in his Encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Pius XI in 1931 and Pope John Paul II in 1991.   The second and third of these followed and built-upon the original of Leo XIII whereby he warned of the evil of socialism and the condition of the working class. 

After describing the oppressive conditions of the working class in 1891, Leo XIII asks whether socialism or capitalism is the answer.  It is important to note that the Church is not proposing any model of economic system. The Church is speaking out on the morality of each system.  Which one provides for the dignity of the human person?  Leo specifically condemns socialism as being contrary to the well-being of the human family.  Rerum Novarum is a brilliant piece of literature and a superb document; well written and argued.  He describes the faults of socialism: “To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State.”  Leo continues: “if these (socialist policies) were to be carried out, the working man himself would be among the first to suffer."

Leo argues that socialism deprives man of property, economic and political freedom. “Socialists, therefore, by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interest of every wage-earner and deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of bettering his condition in life.”  This remedy goes against justice, Leo argues.  Every man has the inherent human right of controlling his life.  This is a right that distinguished him from animals. He was endowed with this right from his creator.  He refers to a human being given dominion over the earth and all that is in it, including animals and the fruit of the land: “Hence, man not only should possess the fruits of the earth but also the very soil.  There is no need to bring in the State. Man precedes the State.”   

 

Leo argues that nature and the laws of nature go with man’s freedom to do what he likes with the fruits of his labor.  “Those who deny these rights do not perceive that they are defrauding man of what his own labor has produced. Is it just that the fruit of man’s own sweat and labor should be possessed and enjoyed by anyone else?”  Private property is in conformity with human nature, Leo argues. He makes the case that socialism is analogous to coveting your neighbor’s property;  a reference to one of the Ten Commandments.  The web site Prageru.com has a terrific five-minute video titled “Was Jesus a Socialist?”  Click here to view it.

 

Man freely must be able to offer his labor for just payment.  His labor will enable him to buy his own property.  This will enable him to support his family and pass on his property to his children.  Socialism denies this ability, and therefore is an assault on human dignity.  “Now, in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property, which he can transmit to his children.”

 

Leo then makes a frontal assault on socialism: “The practice of all ages has consecrated the principle of private ownership, as being pre-eminently in conformity with human nature, and as conducing in the most unmistakable manner to the peace and tranquility of human existence. The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error.  Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself.”  Leo contends that socialism destroys the family and is against natural justice.  “Hence, it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community goods, must be utterly rejected.”

 

Pius the XI in his 1931 Quadragesimo Anno Encyclical, building on the work of Leo XIII, is even more emphatic on the dangers of socialism. Pius XI updates Leo’s encyclical by talking about how socialism morphed into communism; a more lethal system than socialism.  He also attacks bad capitalism with the accumulation of wealth to the few in which free competition has destroyed itself and economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market.  “Communism teaches and seeks two objectives:  Unrelenting class warfare and absolute extermination of private ownership by employing every and all means, even the most violent.”  Pius XI goes on: “We make this pronouncement: Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical fact, or a movement, Socialism, if it remains truly Socialism, even after it has yielded to truth and justice on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teaching of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth.  

 

 Here is where Pius XI makes a bold statement that some, may have heartburn over: “If Socialism, like all errors, contains some truth (which moreover, the Supreme Pontiffs have never denied), it is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Christian socialism are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”  He’s not done yet.  Speaking of socialism: “We have found it laboring under the gravest of evils.  We have also summoned Communism and Socialism again to judgment and have found all their forms, even the most modified, to wander far from the precepts of the Gospel.”

 

Pope John Paul II on the 100^thanniversary of Rerum Novarum in 1991 published a re-reading of it.  John Paul II talks about the failure of communism.  He, again, confirms what Leo XIII and Pius XI stated in their two encyclicals.  As to capitalism he states that “if by capitalism is meant an economic system which recognized the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative.”   John Paul II argues that “man fulfils himself by using his intelligence and freedom. Man’s dignity is tied to his freedom. Like Leo and Pius XI, John Paul II rails against socialism and communism: “This, the root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God.  Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law, and on the basis of correct conception of the human person.”

 

Milton Friedman, the famous American economist, in an interview with TV talk show host Phil Donahue in the late 1970s has a short answer on capitalism vs socialism.  Click here to view it.

Historic Religious Prejudice: For Whom the Bell Tolls

 I've borrowed the title from the great American writer Ernest Hemingway who wrote the classic novel in 1940.  The book deals with the Spanish Civil War and its consequences for society in general. 

Religious prejudice is like acid on metal, it will eventually destroy the metal.   In recent days there has been renewed riots in Northern Ireland.  This time the riots are not because of religion, but for other political factors involving the EU and Brexit. Which brings me to the question, why are they not aligned politically with their brothers in Ireland instead of Britain?  The British have oppressed them for half a millennium.  This, to me, sounds very much like the Stockholm Syndrome.  Most would say that it is for religious purposes.  Catholics against Protestants.  That is the simple answer.

Religious prejudice and bigotry have been with us since the beginning of time.  We've often heard the prejudices between Catholics and Protestants; some of them are very critical of the other. In a Catholic Bible Study, I've heard the leader refer to Evangelicals as some kind of radical fringe group.  Equally, I've heard Protestants refer to Catholics as some sort of anti-Christ non-Christian cult.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In the 1990s I attended two Protestant Churches for about eight years.  I never once heard anything contradicting the Bible.  There are differences in applying the faith, but no major deviation from scripture.  I believe the problem is the misinterpretation or the misunderstanding of what is the core belief in both Catholics and Protestants.

Religious prejudice has some real fatal consequences.  It all started in the mid 11th Century with the schism between the Roman and the Easter Orthodox Church.  Because of the rancor that followed, Christians lost a large part of the Christian world to the Moslem Turks.  Greece itself, the home of the Eastern Church, was itself swallowed up by the Turks.  What is now Turkey was the original Biblical lands; the first seven churches of the Bible, such as Smyrna, Laodicea, Ephesus, Pergamum and others were there.  This is where Christianity started.  Within 400 years of the schism, the entire Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly known as the Byzantine Empire totally collapsed.  A very fine history of the Byzantines was done by historian, Lars Brownworth in his book, "Lost to the West." The obvious question comes up as to why Western Europe failed to help their Christian brothers, the Byzantines.?  The answer is religion.  They so despised each other that they would not help each other.  The result was the Moslem conquest of the entire Byzantine Empire by 1453, with the final conquest of the city of Constantinople.  Imagine if you will, that the free world had failed to help defeat Nazi Germany because we had religious differences.  For whom do the bells toll?  They toll for all of us, sooner or later.

 

His Glory, Your Blood

 You can’t read military history without sympathizing with the common soldier, whether it is the one on your side or the enemy.  War brings out the dark side of man; an example of man’s inhumanity to man.  All wars show the brutality and sheer insanity of the enterprise.  Let’s look at one example: The German invasion of Russia in World War II in 1941 (WW II).  The common theme was the madness of it all.  For the Russians, of course, there was a good reason:  defending themselves from a brutal oppressor.  For the Germans there could be no reason or logic, only depravity.  Let’s put it this way, you own a small house.  You want your neighbor’s house because its four times bigger; you hire a group of hit men (in the case of Germany, its Army) and you go to your neighbor, kill him, and take his property. 

The madness of Adolph Hitler had no bounds.  He wanted to be the master of the world by sacrificing his own people in the process.  All the glory would go to him.   In WW II they called America’s best commander, General George Patton, blood and guts because he used his soldiers to achieve success.  This is debatable, but for another discussion.  With Hitler, though, he invaded, conquered and occupied France, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and many other European countries and did It with some ease.  This probably led him to think of himself as unbeatable. After occupying all these countries, he wanted more, he wanted Russia too.  Russia is the world’s largest country by land size.  To any reasonable person, this would be considered total madness.  A major reason he used for invading Russia was his racism.  Just like his psychosis about Jews, he considered the Russians as sub-human and stupid, uneducated trash.  He wanted to eliminate them like the Jews so he could have more room (lebensraum).  He thought that he and his fellow Germans were a superior race. Hitler's aim was to eliminate all Russians and Jews and  replace them with Germanic people.

 

Failure to learn from history is perhaps the best example of madness, doing the same thing over and over and  expecting a different result.  Napoleon Bonaparte tried to conquer Russia in 1812 and failed miserably.  In this era, France had one of the best militaries in the world.  Of the 500,000 plus army he sent to Russia, only 5,000 survived to return home.  He was crushed militarily and by the winter. Napoleon repeated the same mistakes with England and the rest of Europe, sending men to their deaths just like a football coach sends his players to play the game.  Napoleon met his end at Waterloo, Belgium after his defeat by British and Prussian forces.  In Russia, if you were not killed in battle, the brutal winter weather would kill you.

The German invasion was a sure bet to be a failure.  First for the size of the operation, second for the problems with supplying a three-million-man army for long distances with no adequate roads, rail or air possibilities.  Second, when you have a madman in charge like Hitler, reason, and good military strategy go out the window and good military men who know better were forced to follow commands that would prove to be fatal; and this is what happened.  In the first three months of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans lost more than 500,000 dead.  It is estimated that more than 3,000,000 German soldiers lost their lives in Russia whether by being killed in action or by the weather or by being captured and then either shot to death by the Russians or starved to death, or disease.   The Russians, although they were defending themselves, made some very bad military decisions, sending waves of men into battle against German machine guns where they were all slaughtered.  The Russians, like Hitler, had to follow the madness of their dictator, Josef Stalin.  Russian commanders were beholden to Stalin’s ignorance and sheer incompetence when it came to military matters.  The blind leading the blind.  The Russians, also, were brutal with their own soldiers.  If a Russian soldier was captured and managed to escape, he would be killed upon returning by order of Stalin; punishment for being captured.  If a Russian soldier refused a sure death command, by charging German guns in an open field, for instance, he would be killed by his own commander.

 

The Germans had help in Russia by allies such as Italy, Romania, Hungary and others. The Italians, Romanians and Hungarians each fielded 250,000 soldiers.  All failed measurably.  There was no hope of victory for any of these condemned soldiers.  All was against them.  They were sent there without proper weapons, equipment, clothing, training, officers, means of transportation and so on.  These soldiers were basically condemned to death from the moment they set foot in Russia.  The Russian front was huge, extending more than 1,000 miles wide.  German soldiers were marched into exhaustion, fighting day and night.  The roads were nonexistent and with the bad weather most vehicles were stuck in the mud and failed mechanically.  German soldiers marched to exhaustion.  Their boots were so worn by the march and the bad weather, that many soldiers had to walk bare foot.  They were on constant attack on the ground and by the air.  When all was lost, Hitler would even refuse to let them retreat. 

 

Operation Barbarossa was also significant for the atrocities committed by both sides.  Upon the conquest and occupation of Kiev, for example, the Germans rounded up about 30,000 Russian Jews and shot them to death in open pits.  The Russians where not outdone.  In one case they captured 100 German troops and hung them by their hands, tortured them by lighting a fire under their feet and burned them alive; a horrific way to kill.  As the Spanish philosopher, George Santayana said, those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.  Here are some good examples proving this proverb.

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 For more detailed reading on this subject see the following books:

1. Kiev-1941, Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East, David Stahel, Cambridge University Press, 2012

2. Leningrad, State of Siege, Michael Jones, John Murray Publishers, GB, 2008

3. Stalingrad, Antony Beevor, Penguin Books, 1998