petermullen – Page 38 – All Things Considered

19 Feb

Alexander’s Bootiful Book

How the Future Worked: Russia through the eyes of a young non-person by Alexander Boot. (RoperPenberthy £12.99 ISBN 978-1-903905-82-1)

Winston Churchill described Russia as, “a riddle wrapped up in a mystery inside an enigma.” But Churchill only visited Uncle Joe; Alexander Boot was born and brought up there in the middle of the last century and his depiction of the place is put less politely. He reveals it as an institutionalised kleptocracy, part social cesspit, part concentration camp and part open-air lunatic asylum for fornicating, pugilistic drunks. To this disturbing mix, he adds a universal paranoia in which the customary mode of speech takes the form of telling lies and everyone snitches on everyone else to the KGB. Bribery and corruption – it almost goes without saying – are endemic and are the only means by which a Soviet citizen could obtain housing marginally above the uninhabitable, a pathetically rudimentary schooling and the most hit-and-miss health care.

I used the word “paranoia,” but I was wrong. Paranoia is irrational fear, but anyone not living in perpetual fear in Soviet Russia would be insane. In this communist paradise, a slum flat – and I am talking about the higher class of slum flat – had one gas ring per family and an outside loo to be queued for and squabbled over among a score of people in temperatures of minus 25. I mentioned education, but this was all lies too. For example, the physics textbooks in schools were still defining the atom as the smallest and unsplittable particle 35 years after Rutherford had split it and while Soviet weapons scientists were splitting atoms like crazy every day in the production of hydrogen bombs. In the land where Marx was god and Comrades Lenin and Stalin his prophets, all the great scientific discoveries were declared to have been made by heroes of the revolution.

All great literature too was alleged to have been written by Russians, but even such undoubted luminaries as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov were interpreted only as participants in the sacred Marxian class struggle. Likewise the greatest composer anywhere, anytime was Tchaikovsky. On this matter of the class struggle, there were the most delicious ironies and hyperboles: while the educational and other propaganda authorities relentlessly condemned the West for its class system and attendant inequalities, the USSR was probably the most strictly hierarchical society there has ever been with a bloated and gorged nomenclature creaming off everything of quality and everyone else fighting over the scraps. Stalin made them high and lowly and ordered their estate.

Those in positions of power lived high on the hog with caviar, the best beef and fine wines, while the masses lived on slops and drowned their sorrows in gallons of industrially produced vodka mingled with chemicals so gut-rottingly foul that by the side of which a glass of meths would have seemed like a nice drop of claret. In the overcrowded communal flats, the socially and culturally deprived citizenry went in for promiscuous sex on the grand scale. You might say there was f*** all else to do. The preferred method of contraception was abortion, practised by most women – some having twenty or more.

Lies, damn lies and then Soviet education in which, for instance, the kids were told back in 1961 that the Berlin Wall had been erected to stop the flood of envious capitalists trying to get into the better life which was to be had in the Eastern Bloc. This, even while border guards were shooting wholesale hapless East Germans who tried to flee in a westerly direction. What we refer to as The Second World War, the Soviets call the Great Patriotic War. This is the patriotism in which Stalin regularly ordered a second battalion behind the first battalion advancing to shoot dead any of the ill-equipped and ill-clad, freezing forward troops who might be showing less than complete enthusiasm for the fight.

The central myth by which this terrifying dystopia authenticated itself was the glorious Bolshevik revolution of 1917 which issued in a heaven on earth first under Lenin and then Stalin. And surely the revolution was a jolly good thing for having dethroned all those terrible Tsars? Boot puts this into perspective:

“We weren’t told that throughout the turbulent 19^th century, the bestial Tsars executed all of 997 criminals, including murderers. By contrast, during the five-year reign of Lenin, 1,861,568 were judicially shot by the Cheka – on top of the millions murdered extra-judicially. This before the advent of Stalin whose monstrosities Khrushchev had just exposed in his ‘secret session’ of 1956.”

Stalin slaughtered as many as 40million in his sequential purges, gulags and the collectivisation of farming, the destruction of the peasantry and the consequent impoverishment and mass-starvation of the people.

The wonder is that so many in the West, fellow-travellers – Stalin’s “useful idiots” – actually believed that the USSR was a far better place – “the future that works.” It wasn’t merely the colossally naïve such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb or that self-regarding, overblown mediocrity George Bernard Shaw who regarded the USSR as heaven on earth: many others were and are still in thrall – Stafford-Cripps, Herbert Morrison, Eric Hobsbawm and the so-called Red Dean of Canterbury along with more than a few in the Anglican hierarchy.

This book is not only ferociously and beautifully composed, scintillating in its depth and breadth and allegro molto in pace: it is also, miraculously, extremely funny. Boot combines a Rabelaisian heartiness and an eye for the scurrilous detail with the ineffable comic and satiric touch of Jonathan Swift. Amid all the horrors, I frequently laughed out loud. And once I cried. For Alexander Boot describes a great tenderness that exists in the Russian character and particularly between Russian men:

“In Russia, ‘droog’ means someone with whom I can share my innermost feelings, the last rouble, the last drop of vodka, the last girl. ‘Droog’ is someone I’d give my life for…To a Westerner, ‘friend’ essentially means nothing more than ‘someone I see occasionally who has done me no harm.’ Even ‘my dearest and best friend’ comes nowhere near the voluminous concept of a Russian ‘droog.’ That word, therefore, is not in its true sense translatable into English. Can it be that it’s not needed? I think so, for the English tend to operate within a much narrower emotional band than the Russians.”

This was new to me, surprising and deeply affecting. In the midst of such squalor and horror, such love!

As Churchill used to bawl, “Action this day!” Get yourself a copy of Alexander Boot’s wonderful book, open it up and start to read. You won’t close it again until the last page.

18 Feb

First catch your murderer…then let him go

When capital punishment was abolished in Britain in 1965, to the public’s great displeasure, we were assured that convicted murderers would be given life sentences and that “life would mean life.” But last year the European Court of Human Rights ruled that life sentences must provide for appeal and review and now our own Court of Appeal is about to pronounce on whether this shall be so or not. The ECHR is of the opinion that whole life sentences without the possibility of review or appeal are inhumane and infringe the murderers’ human rights.

This is a subversive opinion announced by a Court notorious for its subversion of the moral order, and therefore of abrogating the very principle of justice it was created to uphold. There are no rights in wrongs. One who commits murder thereby places himself outside the usual social framework of rights. He is correctly described as an outlaw. Moreover, it is not society which makes him into an outlaw, but entirely his own doing by means of his crime. A convicted murderer must, If there is no death penalty, expect to have his freedom removed for the remainder of his days. This is just, and we know directly and intuitively that it is just. Try considering the alternative expressed as a simple proposition: “Killers should go free.” It is patently absurd. In effect it involves declaring that the murderer should not be punished but rewarded for his crime by being granted his freedom.

None of this is merely hypothetical. Between 2000 and 2010, thirty convicted murderers were freed and killed again. There have been a further five such atrocities in the last four years alone.

And it is not the murderer alone who bears responsibility for these deaths: the authorities who grant him his release are responsible too. The problem is that here we have a perverted notion of what responsibility means, as the Court which would free a murderer does so out of a perceived responsibility concerning the murderer’s rights: but this involves having no responsibility concerning the lives of those he is freed to kill.

Thus the social morality of the ECHR is a precise inversion of rational ethics and it amounts to the satanic principle: “Evil, be thou my good.”

17 Feb

The plague of immoderate rain and waters

Prayers published by the Church of England for deliverance from the floods are, well…wet. Here’s one:

“God of all goodness and love,

in whom we can trust in every time of need:

be close to all who live in fear and distress

at this time of flooding in our land.

We pray for wisdom and strength for all who seek to help,

and that through this emergency,

people and communities may be drawn more closely together

in service to one another;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

This is yet another example of the church’s recently-acquired fondness for doggerel words in corny rhythms. I say recently, but it dates back at least as far as that simpering excrescence The Alternative Service Book (1980) – a book, incidentally, trumpeted by the General Synod as “the greatest publishing event in 400 years”; only to ban it its use a mere twenty years later. Does the so liberal Church of England really – like the Nazis – go in for banning books? Yes indeed it does. But why? Because, they wanted to make as much money as possible out of the even worse book which they launched in 2000 – a thing called Common Worship. But back to that doggerel and those rhythms…

The rhythm of that first line echoes a sort of Noddy speech first encountered in the vain-glorious Gloria from that ASB:

“Glory to God in the highest.” The next line clumps along in the same metre, “and peace to his people on earth”

Diddly-diddly-dee-dee. Dee diddle-de-diddle-dee-dee. Here come the floods and the response of church poets is to go back to the playgroup. Par for the course, for all the modern services are infantilised, sentimentalised and euphemised. They are also disrespectful to God and peremptory. Notice how the one I’ve just quoted begins baldly, “God…” Not “Almighty God…” Certainly nothing so Prayer-Bookish and majestic as “God of all power and might…” They don’t like language like that: too elitist, imperialistic, hierarchical and not democratic at all. How reactionary to suggest that God is so much higher up the scale than us! Why, it smacks of feudalism…

It goes without saying that the theology of this prayer is weak to the point of being non-existent. In fact it is not theology at all, but naturalism. The foods just happen and God has no part in what is going on. There is no “plague of immoderate rain and waters” as The Book of Common Prayer majestically puts it. No plague at all: merely an “emergency.” – like running out of cigarettes at two o’clock in the morning. The prayer does not have the courage and faith to ask God to deliver us from the floods but only to form in us a queasy combination of the stoical and the touchy-feely. We shudder at that “may be drawn more closely together.”

Compare what the BCP has to say on the subject:

“O Almighty Lord God…” (That’s more like it!) “…who for the sin of man didst once drown all the world, except eight persons, and afterward of thy great mercy didst promise never to destroy it so again: we humbly beseech thee, that although we for our iniquities have worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters, yet upon our true repentance thou wilt send us such weather as that we may receive the fruits of the earth in due season; and learn both by thy punishment to amend our lives and for thy clemency to give thee praise and glory…”

The new prayer is not written for a world where God is in charge: judging, punishing and delivering. Instead we are merely the pagan victims of a natural order, trying our best to work up in ourselves as much sentimental togetherness as we can muster. It is therefore a faithless prayer. But what should we expect from a faithless church?

15 Feb

Apostolicae Curae

There is room at least for a little clearing of the air.

Many of my friends, and a greater number of my enemies, ask me how I can still profess allegiance to an undoubtedly debauched modern Church of England, heretical in doctrine, tasteless in liturgy and secularised in the realm of moral theology. I answer simply that it was not always like this. The puny timeservers who presently rule the church are not its founding fathers and for this we must thank God. The Church of England is the English language inheritance of the Catholic Christianity which formed religious sensibility in England for almost a thousand years before the mistake described as the Reformation. In other words, the Church of England is apostolically constituted and so founded upon this rock – a rock as legitimate and indeed not inferior to that gang of opinion to be found in Rome.

I am as Catholic as Augustine and Aquinas, as Anselm and Duns Scotus; as Andrewes, Law, Hooker, John Donne, Eliot and C.S. Lewis. That is I am an English-speaking Catholic – which is more than can be said (in the realms both of theology and our native language) of those in high places who now so indispose us

I do not need to justify my Anglican credentials in the face of current episcopal apostasy, of a secularising coterie of bishops and a General Synod in thrall to the nostrums of secular enlightenment. My church is historically founded on its direct descent from the primitive church. This is a fact of history and nothing advanced by the debauched “liberal” hierarchy now governing us can diminish this reality.

So, in answer to the heartfelt questions as to where I should now go after the relentless decline, women bishop and all the rest, I will say simply that I shall stay where I am: a catholic Anglican and delighted to be part of the everlasting church.

Stray bishops reading this piece might ponder – since these days they are taught neither Latin nor history – where the title of this article comes from. It’s from a papal bull of 1896 which declared Anglican orders to the priesthood to be “absolutely null and utterly void.”

How very ecumenical, Holy Father as was. But Your Holiness, have you ever considered the fact that your own credentials are indissolubly joined with mine?

As the Home Guard bloke said in “Dad’s Army,” “They don’t like it up ‘em.”

15 Feb

Are the gates of hell prevailing?

“Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it” So said Jesus to Simon Peter at Caesarea Philippi in response to Simon’s recognising him as the Messiah or Christ.

We can surely trust Our Lord’s promise, but we have to be under no illusions as to its meaning. Christ’s promise was that he would not leave himself without witnesses, not that he would hasten to preserve the shambles of, for instance, the modern Church of England. Many times over the 2000 years of its history, the Christian church has failed its Founder and gone wildly wrong. But the church persists and now there are more Christians in the world than there have ever been. Christianity is particularly strong in sub-Saharan Africa and is increasing in China. Thanks very largely to a Pentecostal revival in Central and South America, the faith is thriving there too, where a strong Protestant ethic is lifting men out of crime and drug-taking and women out of prostitution: thus alleviating poverty – not by so called “liberation theology,” which is only a form of Marxism, but by traditional Christian morality.

But in Europe, whose missionaries evangelised the world, Christianity is in poor shape. the Christian faith created Europe, built its churches and great cathedrals, its hospitals and universities; established the virtue of charity as the foundation of social and commercial life through the trades guilds and livery companies, each of which is dedicated to one of the saints. This faith created a decent set of political liberties, penetrated every social institution, dominated art, literature and music for a thousand years. But now our political masters throughout the continent strive by every means to obliterate Christianity from the public realm and there has emerged a new ethics and a new politics based on the secular, atheistic notions of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution: liberty, equality, diversity, relativism and political-correctness. Since this new ethics denies the ancient concept of Original Sin and therefore produces a false definition of the human character based on the illusory dogma of progress, the political and social ethics of Europe is correctly described as a heresy.

It may be that Christianity will be, if not obliterated in Europe then diminished to a degree that renders it ineffectual, removed from the hearts and minds of huge populations. This secularising process is being assisted by the bishops, the clergy, the synods and councils and the whole apparatus of church governance. The Latin Bible, King James Bible and Luther’s Bible have been ditched and replaced by inferior modern versions. Churches have been re-ordered so that the priest now faces the people when he is speaking to God: thus the visual presentation of transcendence has been debased into a cosy, inwards-looking circle of the likeminded. Traditional liturgies have been discarded and replaced by doggerel forms which reflect the social gospel and the progressivist outlook. (No mention of sin or repentance, for example, in the new Anglican Baptism Service). The doctrines of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and the Miracles have been “demythologised” so that what meaning they retain is only as metaphors for socialism.

Well might Jesus have asked whether the returning Son of Man would find faith on earth. Yes, but not much of it in Europe.

So what can the traditional Christian do? What he must do is pray, repent of the secularising apostasy and ask God to destroy it. Today’s Christians must emulate the desert fathers who escaped degeneracy in their time by retreating to the wilderness where they set up new forms of community. There are no physical deserts available in Europe today, but we can draw ourselves apart by forming strong links with one another by means of modern technology and communications systems: in effect electronic parishes with their website magazines, traditional theological teaching by Google. And we should copy St Augustine (who fought the Pelagians and the Manichees) and St Dominic who, armed with the Rosary, waged intellectual and spiritual warfare on the Albigensian heresy.

Likewise, the calling of the traditional Christian today is to exactly the same spiritual and intellectual warfare. We shall need to use guerrilla tactics and subversion. Nor shall my sword…

For the truth is that what passes for civilisation in Europe today is a heresy at least as demonic as any of the old ones. We can take comfort from the fact that missionaries from the continent we evangelised are now returning to preach repentance and renewal, faith and morals, to our decadent society and debauched culture. Naturally, these missionaries are despised by secular European hierarchies, bien pensant practitioners of the secular Enlightenment.

So what? We were told to rejoice when persecuted. Only nowadays the persecution comes from a rotten core and it is self-inflicted.

Brethren, pray with me that God will deliver us from this body of death, that he will give us the courage, the devotion. the inventiveness and the means to cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light. As the old revivalists used to sing, Come and join us!

13 Feb

Some integrities are more equal than others

Many a good book has been produced as an act of retaliation. For instance, Newman’s magnificent Apologia Pro Vita Sua was provoked by a jibe from Charles Kingsley to the effect that truth didn’t matter to Roman Catholic clergy and moreover they were proud of the fact. I am feeling a bit Kingsleyesque myself as I read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s address to the General Synod in which he said that “inconsistency and incoherence” among members of the Church of England is no bad thing. Well, I have long thought that incoherence and inconsistency are hallmarks of the Anglican hierarchy, but I hardly imagined I would live long enough to hear an Archbishop actually recommend these qualities.

On second thoughts though, what Justin Welby said is rather like the creative device of the “two integrities” ingeniously invented by Archbishop John Habgood back in 1992. By creating flying bishops, this allowed those who opposed the ordination of women equal right – guaranteed by statute – to their view with those who supported women priests

But in what fit of partisan spite does the Synod now decree that the statutory guarantee of their right, and thus their integrity, be withdrawn from the opponents of the appointment of women bishops while it remains extended to supporters of females in the episcopacy? For this is exactly the shameful action perpetrated by the biased Synod this week.

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Four legs good; two legs bad

13 Feb

Coup d’Eglise

The fraudulent bandwagon of Church of England governance rolls relentlessly on. This week the General Synod agreed to fast-track the process which will lead to the appointment of women bishops by the end of the year. Under the agreed measures – which won overwhelming support at the last synod meeting three months ago – female bishops will be introduced with a house of bishops “declaration” setting out guidance for parishes where congregations reject female episcopal oversight. The plans will see the creation of an ombudsman who, appointed by the archbishops and with the backing of lay and clergy representatives in the Synod, will rule on disputes once female bishops are appointed. Clergy who fail to co-operate with the ombudsman could be subject to disciplinary proceedings. Thus the Act of Synod of 1993, the benign inspiration of John Habgood, then Archbishop of York, which guaranteed by statute a permanent place in the church for those who conscientiously oppose the ordination of women, will be rescinded.

Opponents will no longer have this statutory safeguard. The so-called “flying bishops” appointed to provide their pastoral oversight will be no more. Traditionalists will in effect have to rely on the generosity, goodwill and fair-mindedness of the feminists: and we have bitter experience of just how short a way that will take us.

The reality is that the liberal takeover of the Church of England is now complete. In this context “liberal” is the most misused word in the ecclesiological lexicon, for our liberal mistresses and masters exercise liberality only to those with whom they agree. For “liberal” read “totalitarian leftism.” They hate traditional Evangelicals and Anglocatholics, seeing them as throwbacks to an unenlightened era before the feminisation and diversification of the church took place. In his last speech before his retirement, Rowan Williams said all there is to say about the future shape of the church when he declared that we have a lot of catching up to do with the mores of secular society. As if Jesus Christ had commanded, “Go ye into all the world and set up focus groups.”

Well this week’s vote has seen to it that Rowan Williams’ prescribed catching-up has been achieved. The character of the church has been irreversibly changed. In Gertrud Himmelfarb’s memorable phrase: “The counter-culture is the culture now.” And traditionalists can expect no charity from the new regime.

What does all this presage for the future of the church? We can see pretty clearly what this future will be because we have a precedent in the development – I should say decline and fall – of the Episcopal Church of the United States which has adopted all the secular social fads of the the age with the result that that once great institution is now a laughing stock, a caricature of political correctness, with collapsed attendances and the complete loss of its influence in the nation.

Like ECUSA, the Church of England has become a right-on secular sect: its liturgy long since destroyed, its Authorised Version of the Bible cast contemptuously cast aside, its theology demythologised and its pastoralia debased into a form of practical socialism.

At least they should have had the decency to end this week’s synodical proceedings with a Requiem for the C.of E.

09 Feb

Please excuse the terrorists

Some Muslims in London are complaining that they were “unfairly targeted” by the police. It was like this…

They claimed they had returned from an expedition to deliver humanitarian aid in Syria only to be stopped and questioned by the authorities back in England. Does this constitute being “unfairly targeted”? We know that some British Muslims went out to Syria to fight alongside Al Q’aeda and the Sunni militants against Assad. Moreover, we know also that some of these fighters had declared an intention to bomb London on their return. The British police and the government would be failing in its duty to defend the realm if they were to ignore this threat. They have no method of telling, by merely looking at them, the nice humanitarian Muslims from the nasty bomb-throwing Muslims.

I dare say that if the police had simply rounded up all Muslims returning from Syria, put them up against a wall and shot them indiscriminately, there would have been cause for complaint. But by the Muslims’ own reports of the incident, they were not treated roughly. One said, “The police stopped us and said, ’Would you mind if we asked you a few questions?’” Good grief – so the police ask questions! What next? One of those questioned complained further, “Some of us were detained for three hours!” So not thrown into a dungeon and tortured then? But asked a few polite – but no doubt penetrating – questions.

The police were doing their job. The nice Muslims should have been thankful that necessary steps were being taken to protect them against the nasty, bomb-throwing sort. Some Muslims, after all, have form when it comes to murdering the citizens of London.

08 Feb

Stands Scotland where it did?

It’s hard to get excited about Scottish independence, though there have been many attempts by English political leaders to persuade us that it is the most important issue of our time. Mr Cameron – of that clan – is very keen to preserve the union even though this will mean our continued subsidising of all those Scottish socialists. There are no longer any – or at any rate many- Tories in Scotland. The destiny of aspiring Scotsmen seems to be to come to England and become either manager of one or other of our best football teams or, failing that, prime minister.

English Tories were suspicious of the benefits of the 1707 union, seeing in it the conniving achievement of the Scots, after successive disastrous harvests and near economic collapse, to hitch their wagon to England’s mercantile and financial success. Resentment persisted and we catch the tone of it in some exchanges between James Boswell and Samuel Johnson:

BOSWELL: I come from Scotland, Sir

JOHNSON: Yes Sir, and so do a great number of your countrymen.

Johnson’s dictionary also defined oats as a substance which in England provides fodder for horses but in Scotland feeds the population

As I say, I find it difficult to get worked up about the Scottish referendum. Except I am puzzled by what ought to be the centre of the matter, but inexplicably isn’t. We have had a political union with Scotland for 307 years. Whether Scotland retains this union or decides to break it will affect not just the Scots but the English too

Surely the people of both countries should be invited to vote in the referendum?

06 Feb

Rites and Rights

Moaner Cyd Eekie meant well on Thought for the Day when speaking about the treatment of women. No one should treat women disrespectfully, unfairly and certainly not with cruelty or violence. Moaner was, however, supposed to be speaking from a religious perspective as this is the requirement of TFTD. Of course we all know that it is possible to contrive ethical theories according to entirely secular criteria – with what hope of success being, as they say, a matter of some debate. But what is surely illegitimate is to conflate terminology: precisely what Moaner Cyd did in her talk.

The abstract secular vocabulary of human rights was all mixed up with religious notions about care, love and respect. The result was bound to be incoherent.

Why have religious people – Christians, Jews and now it appears even some Muslims – given up basing their morality on traditional deontological ethics – that is ethics which derive from revealed absolutes such as the will of God and God’s law – and taken up instead the relativistic, utilitarian vocabulary involving abstract rights and consequentialist theories? Historically, this always leads to undesirable consequences such as the French revolutionary terror and the atrocities and genocides of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Ethics must – and traditionally have been – based instead on habit, manners and practices rooted in a transcendental reality. And usually accompanied by rituals.

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

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