9/11 and the prescience of Hilaire Belloc

 The persistent rise of radical Islam is no surprise to anyone who has read history extensively and understands the links with the emergence of Nazism and other authoritarian ideologies who were all inspired by the power of the jihad to impose will.  Islam is a compelling example.  


However, i want to say something.  Islam claims to be a revealed religion when that is at best only slightly true.  What it it clearly is is a power doctrine that channels barbarism in order to suppress non Islamic populations in particular and to promote the status of Arab ethnicity in particular.  Hearing voices is common enough even without a blow to the head and those voices are either good or bad depending on your inclination.   That the good spiritual influences speak in a similar manner with similar content to most religions is no coincidence.


That the good is also randomly blended with profound evil in the Koran must be understood and the evil must be  challenged continuously. That is why we are presently sliding toward a global conflict that must separate out the evil placed in those writings in order for it to end as we did with Nazism.  It will not be that much of a hot war so much as a piece meal confrontation in which women and children are removed from communities and put under the care of Christian missionaries who will establish a modern social structure around the women. I use the word Christian here to also denote modern Western humanism also informed by Christian doctrine.


This separation will see many men mature and change over to modern thinking, but it must be made to happen as much as possible.

9/11 and the prescience of Hilaire Belloc

Thursday, September 11, 2014

By C. John McCloskey

 http://www.speroforum.com/a/LHMEXEFZRO27/75201-911-and-the-prescience-of-Hilaire-Belloc#.VCBpzqKwV4A

 

As another sad anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States arrives, it's clear that we are nowhere near the end of this conflict between the radicalized Muslim world and the Christian (and post-Christian) population. There seems no reason why the jihad of a relentlessly committed sector of Muslims may not continue for decades more.

 

While Catholics in America are also engaged in legal, political, and social battles to defend our religious liberties, those of us keeping track of the news in non-mainstream religious ghettos are increasingly horrified by the state of religious liberty elsewhere, and particularly in the Middle East.

 

The place where our Savior was born and lived has been under attack, as have surrounding countries such as Syria and Iraq, where many Christians are being driven from their ancestral homelands or even undergoing martyrdom. While we pray for peace in all countries where people of other faiths too are suffering persecution, naturally, what lies uppermost in our minds and hearts is the tragedy and exile of Christians with ancient roots in this biblical part of the world.

 

The modern-day revival of religious conflict between Muslims and Christians is not the main topic of this column, however. The Church, both Greek and Roman, has been in conflict with Islam (the supposed religion of peace) on and off for over a thousand years now.

 

 

 

 Painting depicting victory of the Holy League at the Battle of Vienna, 12 September 1483, in which the Muslim Ottoman armies were routed.

 

Within the first century or so following Mohammed's death, Islamic forces swept across the Near East and Northern Africa, jumped the strait of Gibraltar to conquer almost all of Spain, and were threatening France. The medieval Song of Roland is a poetic account of the key defense of the Frankish army against Muslim forces in this area, while in Spain tales of El Cid celebrate the early part of Spain's Reconquista, a centuries-long pushback by Christian Spain that barely concluded as Columbus's began his voyage to the New World.

 

After 9/11, no one should be surprised to learn that Islam is turning the West's superiority back on itself. What is surprising is that a lone historian saw this coming in the 1930s. The great Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, friend of G.K. Chesterton and a prolific historian, was prescient as no other writer about the resurgence of Islam in our own era.

 

Here are just of the more salient passages from his work on the threat of Islam to the West:

 

"We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our Faith it will rise."

 

"The future always comes as surprise. . . .but I for my part cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam."

 

"And in the contrast between our religious chaos and the religious certitude still strong throughout the Mohammedan world. . .lies our peril."

 

"There is nothing inherent to Mohammedanism to make it incapable of modern science and modern war."

 

"[Islam] still converts pagan savages wholesale. . . .No fragment of Islam ever abandons its sacred book, its code of morality, its organized system of prayer, its code of morals, its simple doctrine. In view of this, anyone with a knowledge of history is bound to ask himself whether we shall not see in the future a rival of Mohammedan political power, and the renewal of the old pressure of Islam on Christendom."

 

You can read more in this same vein in The Essential Belloc: A Prophet for Our Times, edited by Scott Bloch, Brian Robertson, and myself.

 

Like Spain's long but successful resistance to Islam, and the great sea victory at Lepanto that saved Southern Europe, the Eastern end of Europe also resisted repeated attacks by Muslim forces. One of the most dramatic of Christian Europe's victories occurred quite late, in 1683. A terrific movie was made two years ago in Europe about this historic victory for the Faith and the West: The Day of the Siege. It recounts the successful resistance of a small contingent of cavalry in Vienna against 300,000 Ottoman Empire soldiers.

Briefly, the film begins after the First Siege of Vienna, a century and a half before the 1683 battle, and brings viewers through the various conflicts between European Christianity and Turkish Islam that led up to the September 13, 1683, battle. It then depicts the second siege of Vienna and the assault of Ottoman Turks led by Kara Mustafa and stopped by King Jan III Sobieski.

 

Let us pray to God for the conversion of Muslims – or at the very least that they make use of reason (as recommended by our Emeritus Pope Benedict in his Regensburg lecture) for tolerance and peace!

 

And remember that we Catholics are called to holiness, which in many parts of the world today (and perhaps soon in our own) includes our readiness to sacrifice our lives for our Faith.

 

It is happening in the Middle East and, yes, it can happen here.

 

St. Michael the Archangel, pray for us!

 

Rev. C. John McCloskey is a syndicated columnist. This article first appeared in The Catholic Thing.