New Zealand Conservative

My father fought the evil of fascism, but he was taken advantage of by another evil. He and millions of Soviet soldiers, sailors and airmen, virtual slaves, brought the world not liberation but another slavery. The people sacrificed everything for victory, but the fruits of this victory were less freedom and more poverty. The above paragraph by Mikhail Shishkin published as part of his opinion piece in the New York Times several days ago, I think, is the quintessential summary of Russia and WWII. It does not deny the victory of the Russian people, yet it also does not deny their involvement in bringing misery to many more. To admit this requires a strength and a humility to look into the face of evil, see yourself, and not be consumed or capitulate to it. This is something that all of us, at some point or another have to do when confronting our own past, because no one has an unblemished history. Related link: How Russians Lost the War ~ New York Times

Related links: Wikipedia Turning the Ottoman Tide - John III Sobieski at Vienna 1683 Under Mary's Holy Name: Victory in Vienna, September 12, 1683

While our news media is focused on a small conflict in Palestine, a far more dangerous, expanding war is being fought between Russia and Ukraine: Staunton, July 27 – Having taken the measure of the West and found it wanting, Vladimir Putin has expanded his aggression from the military occupation of Crimea to the organization of irredentist insurgencies in eastern Ukraine to the shooting down of the Malaysian jetliner to the shelling of Ukrainian targets from the territory of the Russian Federation. All these steps are acts of war. But in response, Western leaders have done nothing Putin cannot live with. On the one hand, the sanctions regimes they have imposed or talked about have not hurt him. Instead, they have allowed him to deflect attention from his own failures at home. And if anything, they have contributed to his popularity there. ... If the West continues with economic sanctions being the only thing on the table and with those being leaky and incomplete at best as the ...

Why Putin Let MH17 Get Shot Down ~ The Daily Beast Russia has been escalating its war in Ukraine for weeks. The urgency to win turned to recklessness. President Putin has been recklessly escalating the crisis in eastern Ukraine since he was embarrassed and outmaneuvered by the Ukrainian president three weeks ago. Allowing a passenger jet to be shot down is the act of an increasingly desperate man. The Kremlin ordered tanks, heavy weapons and Russian fighters to pour over the border stoking up the crisis until tragedy struck. We should have seen it coming; on Wednesday morning the front page of Foreign Policy magazine had a headline that should have sent shockwaves through the geopolitical landscape: Russia Is Firing Missiles At Ukraine . The story followed several Russian citizens posting videos to social media which they said show GRAD rockets being fired from Russian territory toward Ukraine. By triangulating the different camera angles , my team at The Interpreter ...

Well, Pope Francis continues to surprise. Apparently, the story below came out late last year, but I didn't hear about it until reading the latest NZ Catholic , where it was reported. According to the story (and a new book), Pope Francis – when he was a priest in the 1970s and early 80s – rescued at least 1000 people using a secret network during Argentina’s “Dirty War”. ROME – Perhaps the single public figure on the planet right now least in need of rehabilitation of his image is Pope Francis, who’s got poll numbers in most places of which politicians and celebrities alike can only dream. Nevertheless, rehabilitation is precisely what Italian journalist Nello Scavo delivers in his new book Bergoglio’s List: The Untold Story of the People Saved by Francis during the Dictatorship, which was presented today at the headquarters of the Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica in Rome. In reply to persistent charges that the young Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio was complicit in Argentina’...

I had to laugh at some of the cries of hypocrisy leveled at Vladimir Putin for the points raised in his Op Ed to the American people over potential strikes in Syria. So Putin doesn't live up to his own standards, what leader does? Obama? What's Mr Peace Prize wanting to do? Oh yes, bomb a country in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons within that country. Maybe Putin has been trying to live up to higher standards lately, maybe he's trying to put his KGB past behind him. Maybe. In this case, however, he is right on most, if not all his points. Anyway, Robert Spencer has been the most interesting commentator on the letter so far : When even the New York Times admits that Barack Obama has been outfoxed, outsmarted and outplayed , you know he has really been outfoxed, outsmarted and outplayed. But there it was, in Wednesday’s edition: “suddenly Mr. Putin has eclipsed Mr. Obama as the world leader driving the agenda in the Syria crisis. ” Putin, wrote Stev...

Why did the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York happen on September 11 in 2001? Plane-sized hole in one of the Twin Towers Because the largest, most decisive defeat of the Muslim incursion into Europe occurred on September 11 and 12 in 1683 at Vienna, after a previous failed attempt to penetrate Europe through Poland: I doubt it was a coincidence.

Two news stories drew my attention today and especially after the attack by two Muslims on a solider in the streets of London the other day in the UK. The first , an attack by machete-wielding Muslims on two men in a barbershop which left the men seriously injured, and the second , a story about a student newspaper at an Australian university having to apologize and withdraw a satiric article about Islam after having previously made fun of other religions or beliefs in other issues with no consequence whatsoever. MACHETE wielding thugs have left two men with ‘serious injuries’ after attacking them in an Accrington barber’s shop. The two victims had been inside the shop in Ormerod Street when four masked men carrying machetes and knives forced their way inside. Detectives investigating the incident said the gang attacked the pair before forcing them into the street. Police said they were looking for a gang of Asian men in connection with the attack. You see, in British '...

This is unbelievable. A pregnant British woman, arrested for carrying the Union Jack - the flag of her own country - because a few Muslims take offence. How many police are there? Four? Five? All to come down and put her in a police van and drive her away. Britain is circling the bowl when the police arrest ordinary patriotic folk at the behest of the followers of an ideology who have declared war on the West.

Christian symbols from an army chapel on base in Afghanistan were removed after an American atheist soldier complained. He didn't like the cross markings on a door and claimed it made him feel like a second class citizen. (He's probably the type of guy that thinks Christian marriage isn't threatened by the existence of gay marriage, but these doors...) I note though that all other doors on the base were marked with absolutely nothing - the sign of secular atheism. In any case, the Army agreed: “It inflames this Muslim versus Christian mentality,” Yes indeed, the army is working off the assumption that the Taleban will not be so inflamed if American soldiers are shooting to kill on an equal opportunity basis that stresses secular adherence and atheism.  Go USA. Story: Army removes crosses The caption relates to a different story: Army Removes Bible Reference from Rifle Scopes . The enemy can now be killed in an non-denominational way. Glad we sorted that out.

I know Lucia is covering the Breivik trial, but I saw this and had to comment on it. Apparently, Breivik says that playing video games like Tour of Duty, 'trained' him for his killing spree. Anders Behring Breivik has described how he "trained" for the attacks he carried out in Norway last summer using the computer game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The 33-year-old said he practised his shot using a "holographic aiming device" on the war simulation game, which he said is used by armies around the world for training. "You develop target acquisition," he said. He used a similar device during the shooting attacks that left 69 dead at a political youth camp on the island of Utøya on 22 July. Describing the game, he said: "It consists of many hundreds of different tasks and some of these tasks can be compared with an attack, for real. That's why it's used by many armies throughout the world. It's very good for acquiring exper...

Another heroic priest, whose sister-in-law couldn't image as anything other than just a normal parish priest. Yet, when given the opportunity he showed complete selflessness and heroism. On 2 November 1950, Father Kapaun made the decision that led to his death. The Korean war chaplain was in the middle of a firefight, with the American forces overrun by Chinese soldiers outside a crossroads town called Unsan in North Korea. Lighting forest fires to frustrate US reconnaissance planes, the Chinese surrounded the Americans and pressed in, attacking with small arms, grenades and even bayonets. Meanwhile, Chaplain Emil Kapaun, a Catholic priest from a farming village in Kansas, gathered the wounded in a dug-out shelter made of logs and straw. When American officers ordered the able-bodied to retreat, Father Kapaun, a 35-year-old captain, refused to leave the wounded. As the Chinese soldiers began lobbing grenades into the dug-out, Kapaun negotiated a surrender. "Fath...

This is worse The images of war took much longer to appear but appear they did. Los desastres de la guerra - Francisco Goya

a civilisation mécanique vient de parvenir à son dernier degré de sauvagerie. Il va falloir choisir, dans un avenir plus ou moins proche, entre le suicide collectif ou l'utilisation intelligente des conquêtes scientifiques [...] Ce n'est plus une prière, mais un ordre qui doit monter des peuples vers les gouvernements, l'ordre de choisir définitivement entre l'enfer et la raison. So wrote Albert Camus on the 8th of August, 1945. A translation reads thus: "Mechanized civilization has just reached the ultimate stage of barbarism. In a near future, we will have to choose between mass suicide and intelligent use of scientific conquests[...] This can no longer be simply a prayer; it must become an order which goes upward from the peoples to the governments, an order to make a definitive choice between hell and reason. The problem with that thought is that the use of reason isn't necessarily a choice to avoid hell. There were reasons aplenty given for droppi...

This address by Fulton Sheen in 1940 was referring to WW2, but it can just as easily be transferred to today's times. He refers to prayer, penance and reparation as the only way to defeat this spirit. He diagnoses the characteristics of it which are it's irrationality, it's violence and it's atheism. We know what it means to be rational; namely, to think before we act. We do not just suddenly find ourselves, for example, standing in a telephone [boo]th; a reason preceded and determined our presence there. As St. John expressed it: “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1) – first the Word, the Idea, the Thought, Reason; then the action: (hand the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The irrational is just the contrary. It is the primacy of action over idea: First you act and then you think why you did it. As Goethe put it: "In the beginning was the Deed." Reason exists, according to this philosophy, merely to justify action, or to ration...

" You have been warned ", thunders today's headline on the front page of the Dominion Post. Monstrous storms, extreme droughts, devastating floods - evidence for climage change is now undeniable, say scientists. These scientists could have just as easily said that evidence for Almighty God being extremely displeased with humanity is now undeniable. In fact, if they had said that instead, they would be more correct. The ultimate punishment is war. Related link: Climate change evidence 'undeniable' More reading: The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima Fatima and Miracles of Conversion Living the Fatima Message

NotPC presents two choices for us to consider: The evil warrior class and the peace creating trader class. Warriors bad, Traders good. Then he acknowledges that warriors are revered (for all the wrong reasons) and traders ignored (until there's a good sale on). That has an element of injustice to it, when we should be thanking traders for exchanging goods for money. I agree with half his argument. Trade is good for peace. A trading culture does bring massive benefits, but setting up a battle between good trader and evil warrior is a losing proposition to me. Here's why:

Selling white poppies a week after ANZAC day? - An Act of Piggyback Marketing Selling white poppies on ANZAC day? - An Act of War Selling white poppies before ANZAC day - An Act of Terrorism For supposedly peaceful people, the mob that want to invade ANZAC day seem to have a distinct lack of empathy and respect for the feelings of others. They are also potentially taking away from fund raising efforts for the vets. An aggressor will tell you that "wars are never necessary", but that's only because, after attacking, they want you to roll over and die. If they want war, I suspect they will get war.

YEAH RIGHT

Polish Hussaria, used in the Battle of Vienna, September 11, 1683. This battle marked the beginning of the decline of the power of the Ottoman Empire.