RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/02/cardinal-george-pell-australias-dreyfus/

The new legal year began this month with various ceremonies, among them the traditional celebration of a “Red Mass” in the Roman Catholic cathedrals of the state capitals. In Melbourne, the judges and lawyers who attended St Patrick’s must have pondered the strange combination of circumstances that have made that imposing Gothic building the alleged locus delicti of Australia’s most publicised and divisive legal case in living memory; and have seen Cardinal George Pell, the prelate whose archiepiscopal seat the cathedral once was, convicted for child sexual abuse – offences committed, it is said, in a sacristy just across the transept from the assembled jurists participating in the Mass.

The Pell case is one of those indicators, like climate change, of where one stands politically. The Left is pretty much anti-Pell en bloc, not so much for any privileged access to evidence, but because he is a conservative, someone who can therefore do no good – just like President Trump, who even if he could somehow fulfil the leftist dream and abolish “global warming” overnight would get no thanks for it. Those who have publicly stated their belief in Pell’s innocence tend to be conservative (Pell’s two most eloquent champions have been Keith Windschuttle, Editor-in-Chief of Quadrant, who has dissected the evidence with a forensic skill unusual even in the highest levels of the legal profession, and columnist Andrew Bolt) but they believe him not because of shared political or other views but because conservative thinking requires good reasons for its conclusions and is not swayed by shallow emotionalism and the shouts of the mob, and the evidence adduced against Pell is about as far from conclusive as any evidence accepted by an Australian court could ever have been.

On March 11, the full bench of the High Court will come together to hear the long awaited appeal by Pell, former Archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, then cardinal in charge of reforming (i.e. cleaning up) the finances of the Vatican, now prisoner no. CRN 218978 at Barwon, Victoria. When it does, the hearing will push whatever is obsessing the media at the time – coronavirus, the horrors of a Trump re-election, the collapse of the British economy after Brexit (that’ll be the wishfully thought-up fake news from the Nine media and the Guardian) off front pages round the world.

https://www.fasfreedom.com/2020/01/russia-and-the-return-of-civilizations-in-the-near-east-part-i/

Part I:

As the new year begins, the Middle East looks eerily similar to the way it has for the last several new years’ eves. Despite civil war in Syria and Libya, those who based their prognosis on the persistence of the reigning paradigm appear vindicated. That paradigm rested on several assumptions. First, the savviness of the rulers of the Arab states, along with the predictability of the traditional opposition (namely the Muslim Brotherhood) survived as the foundation for understanding the region. Second, the outlier power, both geographically and religiously, namely Iran, remains the greatest challenge. Third, the outlier revolt, namely ISIS or al-Qaida, while disturbingly resilient, failed to genuinely challenge the predominance of the ruling elites or established opposition of any Arab nation, and thus remains contained. And fourth, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains at the edge of eruption and thus begs resolution.

And yet, as George Elliot observed in Silas Marner, “The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”

In fact, the warning signs of change are present that very little of what has been will continue to be. In short, as we enter the new year and decade, our understanding of the architecture of the Middle Eastern politics will founder, our imagination will be challenged, and an entirely new “shape” driven by hitherto ignored or nigh-invisible forces will define the Middle East.

In an article making waves, especially among those who are still seeking to realize their dream first articulated during the initial “Arab Spring” that Google and the internet would transform the region, Jonathan Alterman at the Brzezinski Center, believes his studies reveal a rise of individualism informing the current wave of demonstrations in the fertile crescent capitals.

Were such individualism to emerge, then it would indeed upturn the established order. And yet, such a rise in individualism would be startling since it contradicts the essence of familial, social, political, economic and religious life among Arabs Muslims, the culture of which is an amalgam of tribal and communal structures of safety and protection and a theological sense of being on the historically right side of revelation – itself also an intangible structure of protection. Neither pillar serves as a firm foundation for individualism, and in fact, gravitates against it. Thus, if there is indeed a rise in individualism, it would mean a cultural, religious and indeed civilizational shift in these communities. As such, the optimism in the liberal West that the Arab world is finally beginning to modernize would be warranted.

But cultures and civilizations do not easily change. In fact, the historical record shows that their persistence over eras and upheavals is stunning. Indeed, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the Ancient Regime, the underlying culture even after such a cataclysmic event as the French Revolution survived; its structures and patterns just assumed new masters derived from the disillusioned back benches of the old elites. Two thousand miles away, and a century later, the same observation could have been made about the Middle East after the Ottoman collapse: Arab-Ottoman elites, many of whom naturally even spoke Turkish rather than Arabic, who had become increasingly frustrated with the rise of Turkish nationalism rose to take over the residue of the Ottoman imperial administration after the war and became the new elite (in many ways not even new, but now just independent) of the old but now fragmented structures. Students of Russian history would probably make the same observations of the transition from Czar to commissar. Simply put, cultures, absent a millennially traumatic event or population shift, do not change much, and even then, only slightly.