Originally published on August 8 Israel today is showing that an horrific war begun will be horrifically won or lost, as with most wars in history. The lesson? Don’t even think of starting such a war unless you are prepared to finish it. For Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart or anyone else to feign moral indignation only shows… Read More Hamas and Iran. Get Real.
A Strategic Blunder disguised as strength “… North Korea, the only nation conducting actual nuclear tests in recent years, is hardly the standard by which America should calibrate its strategic posture. What Trump has done, whether intentionally or not, is hand a propaganda victory to Beijing and Moscow while potentially accelerating the very nuclear competition… Read More Trump’s Nuclear Testing Blunder
Environmental Socialist Naomi Klein says Elon Musk and some “fascist” Maga friends have “given up on this world” and given in to a secular “Apocalyptic Fever”. In consequence they are using this planet, she says, to extract from this world fossil fuels, critical minerals, water…”anything that can be used for energy and money with a… Read More Artificial World? “End Time Fascism?” Third Temple?
Romano Guardini on “The End of the Modern World“. “This frightful destruction did not drop down from heaven; in truth it rose up out of hell!” —Romano Guardini. Mark Malvasi writes, “…absorbed by technology, [Romano] Guardini anticipated the emergence of a new type of human being that was defined by regimentation and conformity. This “man… Read More Disappearing Into the Collective
Tertiaries, i.e., the Third Order. By Robert Ludlow and James Meyer. Editor’s Note: The following article was adapted from Robert Ludlow’s “St. Francis and His Revolution,” which appeared as an editorial in THE CATHOLIC WORKER (January 1953, and reprinted in Thomas Cornell and James Forest [eds.], A PENNY A COPY, New York: The Macmillan Company,… Read More The Breadth of Catholic Thought: St. Francis’ Revolution
American University Speech, delivered just months before he was gunned down in Dallas, remains more relevant and challenging than ever. Many believe it was this speech which sealed his fate.. “What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons… Read More JFK American University Speech More Relevant Than Ever.
Israel, Gaza and Lebanon, proportionality and preemptive strikes. Fr. Charles McCarthy, a Melkite Catholic priest in Massachusetts, argues that it might be a “mortal sin” to vote for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in this 2024 Presidential election, since each, he says, are in various ways complicit in “grave evil” by supporting and enabling… Read More A Melkite Catholic Priest Bound to Infuriate Many.
“Seeing nuclear proliferation as a major challenge to American power, John F. Kennedy firmly believed that the United States should use its influence to prevent Israel from going nuclear.” “During 1963, President John F. Kennedy was preoccupied with issues such as Vietnam, the nuclear test ban negotiations, civil rights protests, and Cuba. It is less… Read More Fearing Nuclear Proliferation JFK Sought to prevent Israel from going nuclear
Sam Kean examines the dark, restless side of the father of the atomic bomb in The Real Tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer In March 1926, four students from Cambridge University took a vacation in Corsica, an island off France. For ten days, they biked around and hiked the craggy hills and stuffed themselves with seafood in… Read More The Deranged Robert Oppenheimer
What good is “progress” in the wrong direction Chesterton asked. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates… The Jetsons fantasy. After Oppenheimer? Really? But, the Progressives retort, it’s only crazy reactionaries who oppose Penicillin —or Planned Parenthood (as if these were morally equivalent) who oppose Progress. No specious rationalization can justify R&D technology for… Read More Localism — or what?
Dave DeCampMarch 12, 2024antiwar.com President Biden has requested a record $895 billion in military spending for the 2025 fiscal year. Of that amount, about $850 billion will go to the Pentagon, and the remaining funds will go to other US federal agencies for military programs, including the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons program. While a massive… Read More Endless Warfare. Biden Requests $895 Billion For Military Spending For 2025
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” — Bhagavad Gita, Robert Oppenheimer “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.” — JFK, American University, 1963 “The dropping of the… Read More Oppenheimer and The End of Time.
By Solange Hertz Any citizen doubting that the Old Religion of the alchemists is the state religion of the U.S. need only make a pilgrimage to the nation’s capital, beginning with the Prayer Room established in the Capitol by joint resolution of Congress in 1954. He will find there for his devotion a small central… Read More Our State Religion
No Conceivable…Justification” for aerial warfare, “dreadful weapons”. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, head of the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII and John XXIII, wrote in 1947: “The extent of the damage done to national assets by aerial warfare, and the dreadful weapons that have been introduced of late, is so great that it leaves both vanquished… Read More What Could These Men Possibly Have Had in Common?
“The Unspeakable. What is that? Surely, an eschatological image. It is the void that we encounter, you and I, underlying the announced programs, the good intentions, the unexampled and universal aspirations for the best of all possible worlds. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the… Read More Merton on The Unspeakable
Thomas Reeves, the author of “America’s Bishop,” a biography of Fulton J. Sheen, tells of Sheen’s concerns regarding what he saw as the accelerated secularization occuring during WWII. Reeves mentions in particular the bishop’s 1944 book Seven Pillars of Peace where the subject is treated. This secularization involved the breakdown of the family which Sheen… Read More Bishop Sheen, Rosie the Riveter, and the War’s Greatest Casualty
The Weston Institute for International and Public Affairs The Watson Institute, Brown University, R.I., is a community of scholars, practitioners, and students whose work aims to help us understand and address these critical challenges. It is dedicated to meaningful social science research and teaching, and animated by the conviction that informed policy can change systems… Read More Ukraine: A Terrifying Scenario
It’s not about personalities, he insists. “We have stupid people running our country now” and if we don’t change, he says, “you’re going to have no world.” [Full disclosure: I am Politically Independent. I will vote for Right or Left candidates, or not vote at all, depending on the truth of the issues and the… Read More Trump: Change or “The World is Going to Blow Itself Up”
Statement on the Ukraine conflict – A Call to Peace and End to War. Los Angeles Catholic Worker. “We are anti-war. We believe war is a moral failure stemming from our unwillingness to actively work for peace. From the individual to the collective national level, the prioritizing of shortsighted self-interest has created this crisis. Victims… Read More The Russia – Ukraine Tragedy
Rocco Buttiglione is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Pius V University in Rome, and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. “… we reach the heart of the question which interests us. To appreciate its full scope, let us take G. W. F. Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of History’ as a point of… Read More John Paul II, Poland, and the Hegelian Menace
Prayer For Peace by Pope John Paul II. O God, Creator of the universe, who extends your paternal concernover every creature and guides the events of history to the goal of salvation, we acknowledge your fatherly love when you break the resistance of mankind and, in a world torn by strife and discord, you make… Read More Saint John Paul II Prayer for Peace
… very reasonably. — America dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone. What a bloody end to Obama’s reign — The Guardian “What does the administration have to show for eight years of fighting on so many fronts? Terrorism has spread, no wars have been “won” and the Middle East is consumed by more chaos and… Read More What Concerns Millions
Karol Wojtyla (JPII) wrote, “A non-Catholic philosopher once said to me: ‘You know, I just can’t stop myself reading and rereading and thinking over the first three chapters of Genesis.’ And indeed it seems to me that unless one does so reflect upon that fundamental Ensemble of facts and situations it becomes extremely difficult if… Read More John Paul II on the Most Decisive Confrontation —and History’s ‘Last Lap’
“The physicist Albert Einstein did not directly participate in the invention of the atomic bomb. But as we shall see, he was instrumental in facilitating its development.“ “In 1905, as part of his Special Theory of Relativity, he made the intriguing point that a large amount of energy could be released from a small amount… Read More Albert Einstein and the Bomb
Cardinal Ottaviani, head of the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII and John XXIII, wrote in 1947: “The extent of the damage done to national assets by aerial warfare, and the dreadful weapons that have been introduced of late, is so great that it leaves both vanquished and victor the poorer for years after. Innocent… Read More “No Conceivable…Justification”. Aerial warfare’s “dreadful weapons”.
Catholic Critique 