RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16526/turkey-greece-fifth-war

On August 28, a former MP from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party, Metin Külünk, published a map of “Greater Turkey” which illustrates the extent of Turkey’s revisionist ambitions. It includes areas of Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Syria, Iraq, Georgia and Armenia.

In a similarly threatening statement, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar provocatively advised Greece to remain silent “so as not to become a meze [snack] for the interests of others.”

Erdoğan’s fifth war would be one with no winners. But Erdoğan’s Turkey would be the bigger loser.

During the 20th century, the Turks and their traditional Aegean rivals, the Greeks, fought four conventional wars: The First Balkan War (1912-1913); the First World War (1914-1918); the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922); and the Cyprus War (1974). So it is not the first time during an expanse of peace that newspapers across the world are telling their readers that the Aegean Sea is on the brink of war. “Peace” across the Aegean has always been cold-to-very-cold except for brief periods of relative warmth. It looks as if Turks and Greeks live in neighboring homes built on a centuries-long blood feud.

Charles King, in his book Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, wrote about the early post-Ottoman years in Istanbul and the nation-building efforts of the infant Republic of Turkey:

“Istanbul’s non-Muslim minorities fell from an estimated 56 percent in 1900 to 35 percent by the late 1920s. Other cities had more dramatic decreases. Izmir, the former Smyrna, went from 62% non-Muslim to 14%… But the demographic revolution changed virtually everything in the old minority neighborhoods of Istanbul. In the rush to leave, Greeks, Armenians and Jews dumped the contents of their houses and apartments onto the secondhand market, hoping to gain at least a small amount of cash before boarding a ship or train…

“Turkey as a whole became more Muslim, and more Turkish, more homogeneous and more rural — because of the flight of non-Muslim minorities from cities — than it had ever been. Some of the families who would go on to become the mainstays of Istanbul’s economy emerged [by]… keeping an eye on changing fortunes and translating political connections into economic advantage once the Greek and other minority businesses went up for sale. There was nothing necessarily dishonest about their dealings, but they rested on a massive transfer of wealth whose origins lay in the republic’s preference for national purity over the old cosmopolitanism of the imperial capital.”

After three wars at the beginning of the century, Turkish-Greek tensions would next explode in Cyprus, where Turkish and Greek Cypriots lived side by side and in peace until after the 1950s, when they started to slaughter each other. Ethnic strife led to the Turkish military operation in July 1974 that ended with its occupation of the northern third of the island. Cyprus has remained divided along ethnic lines ever since.

In 1996, the Turkish and Greek militaries came close to a hot engagement over sovereignty claims over a tiny islet in the southern Aegean Sea. A few years after successful U.S. mediation averted war, few Turks or Greeks even remembered the name of that 9.9-acre, uninhabited islet: Imia (Kardak in Turkish).

Today’s tensions, stretching from the Aegean to the Eastern Mediterranean, look more serious than two teenagers in a tug-of-war over a piece of rock.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/pope_francis_goes_full_communist.html

In an encyclical published on Sunday, Pope Francis announced that he’d had an epiphany thanks to the Wuhan virus: It’s time to ditch capitalism. But that’s not all. He believes, too, that in a time of a serious infectious disease, we should focus even harder on open borders.  And he blithely upended almost two millennia of Church doctrine by doing away with St. Augustine’s “just war” theory.

These actions reflect Francis’s Catholic upbringing within the communist “liberation theology” of the Latin American church. They may also show the effects of his ongoing alliance with Chinese communists and with Muslims.

Fox Business sums up the gist of Francis’s communist dreams (emphasis mine):

“Aside from the differing ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident,” Francis wrote. “Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.”

He cited the grave loss of millions of jobs as a result of the virus as evidence of the need for politicians to listen to popular movements, unions and marginalized groups and to craft more just social and economic policies.

“The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom,” he wrote. “It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at ‘promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity’ and makes it possible for jobs to be created, and not cut.”’

[snip]

As an outgrowth of that, Francis rejected the concept of an absolute right to property for individuals, stressing instead the “social purpose” and common good that must come from sharing the Earth’s resources. He repeated his criticism of the “perverse” global economic system, which he said consistently keeps the poor on the margins while enriching the few — an argument he made most fully in his 2015 landmark environmental encyclical “Laudato Sii” (Praised Be).

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/italy-muslim-migrant-murders-priest-pope-calls-robert-spencer/

The irrepressible Pope Francis is at it again: in his Angelus address last Sunday, he announced: “Today the Church celebrates the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. I greet the refugees and migrants present in the Square around the monument entitled ‘Angels, unawares,’ which I blessed last year.” He spoke with sympathy about “the internally displaced, who are forced to flee, as also happened to Jesus and his family. ‘Like Jesus, forced to flee,’ likewise the displaced, migrants. Our remembrance and our prayer to them, in a particular way, and to those who assist them,”

Yet this came just days after Mahmoudi Ridha, a Muslim migrant from Tunisia, murdered a Catholic priest in Italy, Fr. Roberto Malgesini. After killing Malgesini, Ridha crowed: “The priest died like a dog, that was right.” According to Church Militant, in the wake of the murder, “police have categorically rejected the Italian bishops’ claim” that Ridha “had mental problems.”

After the murder, Pope Francis, as determined as ever to ignore the grim reality of Islamic jihad, declared that Ridha was “a person in need” and “malata di testa,” which is bad Italian for either “sick in the head” or a “headache.”

“I am not sure if Pope Francis is being deliberately ambiguous or speaking poor Italian as he often does,” said an Italian linguist. “Of course, he wouldn’t like his pro-migrant, pro-Muslim narrative to be disrupted if the assassin were found to have jihadi motives.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/04/china_foreign_affairs_and_the_anti-ideology_delusion_144345.html

The China challenge has revived an old and often arid quarrel about the relationship in foreign affairs between ideas and interests. Reconsidering that quarrel in light of the ideas that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) professes and the interests the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursues provides a fresh understanding of the threats that China poses to freedom. 

The extreme form of the debate is generally confined to the domain of political science professors in the field of international relations. On one side stand the so-called realists. 

They maintain that the distribution of power within the international system — including the logic of, and the interests inherent in, countries’ particular geopolitical circumstances — drives nation-state conduct. On the other side stand those classified as idealists. They contend that a country’s ideas — government officials’ leading principles and favored doctrines, the people’s customary opinions and perspectives, and the habits of heart and mind of both — provide the key to nation-state conduct. These pure views appear among commentators and policymakers in watered-down form as dominant intellectual tendencies.

The case of the CCP and of the Chinese nation that it despotically governs proves the wisdom of the common-sense view: as with individuals so too with nation-states, ideas and interests are inextricably connected. The ideas to which the CCP is committed — a distinctive blend of dogmatic Marxism-Leninism and extreme Chinese nationalism — undergird the regime’s dictatorial rule at home. These ideas also fuel the party’s ambition to bring under Beijing’s sovereign control formerly free and democratic Hong Kong, still free and democratic Taiwan, and areas of the South China Sea far beyond China’s internationally recognized territorial waters; animate the party’s schemes to lure nations around the world into relations of economic dependence; and drive the CCP’s plan to reshape international organizations so that they conform to the principles of socialism as the party has decreed them.

Last month in an important article in Foreign Affairs, Elbridge Colby and Robert D. Kaplan appeared at times to take exception to the common-sense view. In “The Ideology Delusion,” they offer salutary warnings about the wrong way to connect ideas and interests. Unfortunately, their well-taken points about the excesses of ideologically oriented foreign policy occasionally slide into the extravagant claim that the very attempt to understand state conduct and great-power competition in light of leaders’ and peoples’ ideas about politics and international relations reflects the delusion that ideas are pertinent to foreign affairs.