Category Archives: Religion

Russia, China, Iran… and Saudi Arabia? By Ron Unz

America is reaping what it has sown. From Ron Unz at unz.com:

On Friday geopolitical plates of tectonic scale may have visibly shifted as Iran and Saudi Arabia, two of the most important countries in the Middle East and erstwhile bitter adversaries, announced that they had reestablished diplomatic relations after a lengthy round of negotiations held with top Chinese officials in Beijing.

Back in 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt famously met on an American cruiser with Ibn Saud, and our important alliance with oil-rich Saudi Arabia came into being.

Though sometimes stressed during the 1973 Oil Embargo and in the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks, the relationship remained our most important in the Arab World, being responsible for the rise of the Petrodollar and the maintenance of our own greenback as the world’s reserve currency. With America’s industrial base having been reduced to a mere shadow of its once global dominance and our country plagued by horrendous annual budget deficits and accumulated debt, much of our national prosperity and current standard of living probably today depends upon that maintaining that status.

Meanwhile, during the four decades since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, no country in the region has been a greater object of American hostility than Iran. As recently as January 2020, we assassinated Gen. Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s greatest military commander, who had been considered a likely presidential candidate in their 2021 elections.

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AS`AD AbuKHALIL: Saudi-Iran Deal a Possible US ‘Suez Moment’

It looks the U.S.’s dominant power in the Middle East has reached its sell-by date. From As`ad AbuKhalil at consortium news.com:

The U.S. does not want to experience what Britain experienced in Suez in 1956: a watershed moment signaling its global decline.

Smoke rises from oil tanks beside the Suez Canal hit during the initial Anglo-French assault on Port Said, Nov. 5, 1956. (Fleet Air Arm, Imperial War Museums, Wikimedia Commons)

The announcement in China on Friday of the resumption of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran (after a 7-year freeze) caused a stir in Washington with U.S. mainstream media underlining the rise of China’s diplomatic role in the region at the expense of the U.S.

The U.S. has consistently aborted diplomatic initiatives of its allies and adversaries alike. China, on the other hand, emphasized that the cornerstone of its policies in the region is peace and diplomatic relations, in clear contrast to U.S. and Western roles in launching wars and instigating conflict.

Iran has been calling for the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia for a few years, but Saudi Arabia snubbed all those initiatives. The Saudi government has been trying to win a brutal war in Yemen, which basically, and paradoxically, brought Iran closer to the Saudi border by virtue of Houthi reliance on Iranian assistance in the face of Saudi savagery.

The Iraqi government (through its Shiite component) has been mediating between Saudi Arabia and Iran for a few years. The Shiite political groupings in Iraq are fully aware that a rapprochement between the two countries would reflect favorably on the relations between Sunni and Shiite political grouping in the country.

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Mediated By China Iran And Saudi Arabia Restore Ties – There Are Winners And Losers, by Moon of Alabama

In a world of ubiquitous hyperbole, this actually is, as Moon of Alabama says, “huge.” From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

This is huge!

Regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia agree to restore ties after years of tensions
The deal, which will see the two countries reopen embassies in each other’s capitals, was sealed during a meeting in China and announced Friday in a joint communique.

Archrivals Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed Friday to restore diplomatic relations, a dramatic breakthrough brokered by China after years of soaring tensions between the regional rivals.

The deal, which will see the two countries reopen embassies in each other’s capitals, was sealed during a meeting in China — a boost to Beijing’s efforts to rival the United States as a broker on the global stage.

The agreement also may put a dampener Israel’s ongoing efforts to normalize relations with its Arab neighbors.

The talks were held because of a “shared desire to resolve the disagreements between them through dialogue and diplomacy, and in light of their brotherly ties,” according to a joint communique from Tehran, Riyadh and Beijing that was published by the Saudi Press Agency, the country’s official news agency.

The agreement followed intensive negotiations between Ali Shamkhani, a close adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni, and Saudi Arabia’s Minister of State Musaad bin Mohammed Al-Aiban, according to the statement.

It added that the foreign ministers from both countries would “meet to implement this, arrange for the return of their ambassadors, and discuss means of enhancing bilateral relations.”

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Seismic Iran-Saudi Rapprochement Isolates US, by Joe Lauria

Seismic is exactly the right word for it. From Joe Lauria at consortiumnews.com:

The Chinese-brokered diplomatic deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran not only opens the way for resolution of region-wide conflicts, but foils U.S. Mideast designs based on Saudi-Iranian enmity, writes Joe Lauria.

King Salman greets Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Chinese Foreign Ministry)

Ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-allied Shah of Iran, the rivalry between the two major Middle East powers — Iran and Saudi Arabia — has been at the heart of every conflict across the region.

The announcement on Friday that Iran and Saudi Arabia have normalized relations could have a seismic effect on all these conflicts and leave the U.S. on the outside looking in.  

In Lebanon, Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Saudi-backed parties might begin to resolve their differences, a unity that would worry Israel and lessen U.S. influence in the country.

In Syria, Hezbollah and Iranian militias have been battling Saudi-backed jihadists for more than a decade.  The Syrian war could now come to an end.

In Yemen, U.S.-backed Saudis have been fighting the Houthi, who have been driven into a closer alliance with Iran. Obstacles to a peace deal could now have been removed.

In Iraq, reconciliation between Sunni and Shia could make the U.S. presence and influence irrelevant and unwelcomed by all sides. 

In Bahrain, Iranian-backed Shi’ites no longer in conflict with the Saudi-aligned monarchy could sideline the presence of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in a region on the mend.

And in Saudi Arabia itself, the state’s tensions with Shi’tes in the eastern oil regions should lessen.  

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Have the Ancient Gods Returned? By Dr. Naomi Wolf

Why all the Satanic symbols and rituals the last few years? From Dr. Naomi Wolf at naomiwolf.substack.com:

Is a Seemingly Far-Fetched Premise, Unfolding After All?

These days, to my surprise, people want to talk to me about evil.

In a Substack essay last year, and in my book The Bodies of Others, I raised a question about existential, metaphysical darkness.

I concluded that I had looked at the events of the past two and a half years using all of my classical education, my critical thinking skills, my knowledge of Western and global history and politics; and that, using these tools, I could not explain the years 2020-present.

Indeed I could not explain them in ordinary material, political or historical terms at all.

This is not how human history ordinarily operates.

I could not explain the way the Western world simply switched, from being based at least overtly on values of human rights and decency, to values of death, exclusion and hatred, overnight, en masse — without resorting to reference to some metaphysical evil that goes above and beyond fallible, blundering human agency.

When ordinary would-be-tyrants try to take over societies, there is always some flaw, some human impulse undoing the headlong rush toward a negative goal. There are always factions, or rogue lieutenants, in ordinary human history; there is always a miscalculation, or a blunder, or a security breach; or differences of opinion at the top. Mussolini’s power was impaired in his entry to the Second World War by being forced to share the role of military commander with King Victor Immanuel [https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/fascist-king-victor-emmanuel-iii-italy]; Hitler miscalculated his ability to master the Russian weather — right down to overlooking how badly his soldiers’ stylish but flimsy uniforms would stand up to extreme cold. [https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/hitlers-winter-blunder/]. Before he could mount a counter-revolution against Stalinism, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City in his bath. [https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/leon-trotsky-assassinated-mexico]

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Does Israel Seek a “Final Solution for Palestinians?”, by Philip Giraldi

It takes a certain chutzpah to pretend that Israel is more sinned against than sinning in its long-running conflict with the Palestinians. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

Diaspora Jews choose to look the other way as the carnage increases

There is what passes for a sick joke among those who watch the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians with increasing shock over what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his thugs have been allowed to get away with. It goes something like this: Israel has succeeded in killing or driving out the remaining three million or so Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, describing them as “terrorists.” President Joe Biden, his cabinet and virtually all of Congress respond afterwards by saying how the move was unfortunate but “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Such is the power of Israel as manifested through its Lobby in the US, and the saddest part of the joke is that it reflects quite likely exactly what would happen. The Palestinians have no constituency in the United States, where Israel and its friends rule the roost. But one of the real ironies of watching a genocide being carried out now in the twenty-first century is that the killers come from a group that constantly flaunts its claimed status as history’s perpetual victims. This duality is a convenience, to be sure, providing as it does immunity from its own crimes as it also escalates the criminal policies that might lead to the genocide of a whole category of potential “enemies.”

Israel’s new government, again headed by the monstrous Benjamin Netanyahu, has shifted hard to the right, incorporating as it does the extremist settlers’ movement as well as parties that have spoken casually of forcing the Palestinians out and even of extermination if it comes to that. Half of Israelis are comfortable with the Arabs having minimal civil rights even if they are Israeli citizens and many accept the desirability of forced expatriation of the Palestinians to neighboring states like Jordan or Lebanon. Arab residents of Israel have only limited legal rights and, contrary to the US domestic Israel Lobby’s constant assertion that the Zionist entity is a “democracy,” Israel in reality became an apartheid state by law when it in 2018 declared itself to be legally the nation state of the Jews with “exclusive right of self-determination.”

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The Last Liturgy…, by Stephen Karganovic

Of course, none of Ukraine’s Western sponsors has a problem with this. From Stephen Karganovic at strategic-culture.org:

The Kiev Nazi junta is taking decisive steps to eradicate every vestige of Russian Orthodox heritage on the territory it still controls.

Few will remember French novelist Alphonse Daudet’s poignant short story, “The Last Class.” It is about the consequences of the seizure by Germany of the French province of Alsace in 1871, at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war. Monsieur Hamel, the French language teacher at the local school, rises “pale from his chair… My friends, he said, my little friends… But he could say no more; he was not able to speak the words.”

Monsieur Hamel’s sad duty was to inform his pupils that this would be the last class in French that was allowed to be taught. Starting the following day, it would be in German.

Occupied Ukraine is heading in precisely the same direction. The Kiev Nazi junta is taking decisive steps to eradicate every vestige of Russian Orthodox heritage on the territory it still controls. Besides the already outlawed Russian language, religious institutions are also a principal target. Over the last two months, as the regime’s prospects have turned increasingly precarious and survival uncertain, it has been conducting probably the last but also the most painful of its pogroms. Numerous churches and facilities of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church in communion with the Moscow Patriarchy have been stormed by the secret police and priests, monks, and laypeople arrested and harassed. Without even a pretence of legal procedure, parishes belonging to the legitimate Church have been handed over to the unrecognised church entity set up in 2018 for the express purpose of supplanting it, with the connivance of the corrupt and renegade Ecumenical Patriarchy of Constantinople. Quite naturally, one of the main targets of this persecution is the symbolic Kiev Pechersk Monastery overlooking the capital. It is under the jurisdiction of the canonical church.

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Russia’s Neo-Byzantinism, by Laurent Guyénot

Here’s a crazy idea. Maybe before the U.S. gets fully involved in war with Russia, we should learn a little bit about Russian history and culture. It couldn’t hurt. From Laurent Guyénot at unz.com:

There is something irresistibly attractive in Russia’s defense of traditional and religious values (what might be called Russian neo-conservatism if that label had not been usurped by American Jewish warmongers). But where does it really come from? We tend to assume that it is a reaction to Western post-modern decadence. But there is more depth to it.

What is Russia? How does Russia define herself, and how does she conceive of her relationship to Europe? Specifically, from what tradition do Russia’s current ruling elites draw their vision of Russian civilization? I wanted to learn about the Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the Russians themselves have rediscovered since the fall of Communism, and who are said to have a strong influence on Vladimir Putin and his entourage. Here is what I found.

Let’s start, quite logically, with three authors whose books were offered by Vladimir Putin to governors and members of his United Russia party for the New Year 2014 (see here and here):

  • Vladimir Solovyov’s The Justification of the Good
  • Nikolai Berdyaev ‘s The Philosophy of Inequality
  • Ivan Ilyin’s Our Tasks

All three authors are deeply religious and patriotic, and as such committed to Russian Orthodoxy. All three are passionate about Russia, and hold her as “an original and independent civilization,” in the terms used by Vladimir Putin in his October 27, 2022 speech at the Valdai Forum.

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The WEF isn’t a cabal, it’s a cult. By Mark E. Jeftovic

A totalitarian regime doesn’t keep its supporters in line with perks and power . . . they have to believe! From Mark E. Jeftovic at bombthrower.com:

World Domination in An Age for Lucifer

 

“This book explores a strange new spirituality about to enter into competition with other established religions. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probable, if not inevitable.


I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on Darwinian evolutionary principles: a new predator will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to prey on humans. Another assumption then follows: this predator will evolve gradually and incrementally from humanity, just as we apparently evolved from lower forms to prey on them.

A further assumption suggests that these predators have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as new humans with advanced methods of survival and new forms of spiritual expression and religious organization designed to support and advance their predation.“

— Robert C Tucker, An Age For Lucifer

Robert C. Tucker was a Canadian psychologist who worked with an organization called COMA – Council On Mind Abuse (not to be confused with his namesake, an American political scientist who covered the Soviet Union and wrote a biography of Stalin).

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Stop the Empire’s War on the World: From Tom Lehrer to Robert Frost, by Batiushka

It’s a war the empire is bound to lose. From Batiushka at thesaker.is:

There always have been and always will be clashes and tensions between different civilisations. In the words of an old Tom Lehrer song, National Brotherhood Week:

The Protestants hate the Catholics,
The Catholics hate the Protestants,
The Muslims hate the Hindus,
The Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews.

So sang a Jewish singer, some of whose ancestors, I believe, fled to the USA after the 1905 pogrom in Odessa, a city which for the moment is still in the Ukraine) (1).

This brings us to examining the old saying that: ‘Religion is the cause of all wars’. As a priest, I can in a sense agree with that, as also with Marx’s saying that ‘Religion is the opium of the people’. I can agree with them both because, as a priest, I do not hold with religion and I am not religious. Thank God!

Perhaps I should explain to the confused.

Religion has always been a State manipulation, used in order to control populations. If you have ever visited a Protestant church, you will know this. There, to our astonishment, people have to file in and are directed to sit down in regimented rows in certain seats, and are then told to stand up and sit down, while being bombarded with moralising speeches to make them feel guilty and cough up cash. A clearer case of organised mass manipulation can surely not be found. However, in fairness it must be said that States are capable of doing the same with absolute any ‘religion’.

States use religion to divide and create wars. (So, religion is not the cause of all wars, but it is used as a disguise for the cause of all wars). Why? Because if you openly say, ‘we are going to invade you because we are a different ethnic group and we are extremely greedy and vicious and want to steal and plunder your territory and natural resources’, people may well not follow you. But if, like George Bush, you say ‘God told me to invade Iraq’, or, ‘NATO’s role is to bring freedom and democracy’ (and forget to add, ‘even if it means wiping you off the face of the earth’), you will always find some venal journalists, useful idiots and propagandised zombies to believe you and follow you. In other words, States have always used religion as camouflage to justify their base and basest motives. Hence, religion is indeed the opium of the people.

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