Month: May 2007

Where Are the Anti-Communist Movies?

Abortions, pornography and contraceptives will be banned in the new Florida town of Ave Maria, which has begun to take shape on former vegetable farms 90 miles northwest of Miami.
Tom Monaghan, the founder of the Domino’s Pizza chain, has stirred protests from civil rights activists by declaring that Ave Maria’s pharmacies will not be allowed to sell condoms or birth control pills. The town’s cable television network will carry no X-rated channels.
The town will be centred around a 100-foot tall oratory and the first Catholic university to be built in America for 40 years. The university’s president, Nicholas J Healy, has said future students should “help rebuild the city of God” in a country suffering from “catastrophic cultural collapse.”

That’s the question being asked by David Boaz over at TCS Daily.

He notes that there have, actually, been some anti-Communist movies, but not nearly as many as there have been anti-Nazi movies, and the Communists killed far more people than the Nazis, thus creating innumerable dramatic human situations that could be illuminated through film.

I’ve got two thoughts on why there haven’t been as many anti-Communist movies:

1) Hollywood tends to the left of the political spectrum. It’s cultural/political ethos is socialistic to begin with, and there is less of a desire on filmmakers’ parts to go after Communists than people (like Nazis) that they perceive to be on the opposite end of the political spectrum (though, in actuality, the Nazi party was the National Socialist party).

2) The Cold War never got hot. What made Naziism so riveting and enduring an evil in film is the fact that a whole generation of Americans went off to fight it. Communism was a looming menace, but since we and the Russians (or the Chinese) never squared off in an actual world war, that looming menace never turned into the generation-defining experience that World War II was. If Stalin massacred more civilians than Hitler did (let’s suppose; I haven’t checked the numbers), we never had to fight Stalin, and that kept him from becoming an archtypal villain equivalent to Hitler in cultural stature. (Though he has clearly been the first runner-up in that category.)

So those are my theories.

What’re yours?

Pipes on Fascism Old and New

Yes, I know Daniel Pipes is a reliable apologist for Israeli policy, and likely biased in his assessments, but I have been surprised myself at the extent of the connections – not just ideological, but historical, political and structural – between the Islamofascists (for want of a better term) of the last half-century and Hitler’s Third Reich.

Guys like Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein could trace their political lineage directly to card-carrying Nazis. Fellas like Grand Mufti Mohammad Amin al-Husayni were their heroes and mentors.

Makes you wonder if Arab countries labeling Israel as the aggressor in the Middle East isn’t more brazenly twisted than O.J. Simpson and his search for the "real killers".

PIPES’ LATEST on CATHOLIC EXCHANGE.

The X Party Vs. The Y Party

It’s not uncommon to hear people refer to the Democratic Party as the "Mommy" party and the Republican Party as the "Daddy" party, but Michael Medved has a different way of characterizing the two.

In this column, he contrasts the "Senator" party with the "Governor" party, assigning the former role to the Democrats and the latter to the Republicans.

He bases this on a look at both where their recent presidential nominees have come from (legislative or executive backgrounds) and where their current crops of presidential hopefuls come from.

He also suggest that the tendency of Democrats to nominate senators for president and Republicans to nominate governors has to do with their (or at least their parties’ nominating core’s) view of government and the proper role of the presidency.

It’s an interesting hypothesis.

It’s also interesting to contemplate how it matches up with conventional political wisdom that it’s easier to get elected president if you’re a governor than if you’re a senator. One theory proposed to explain this is that governors have less of a paper trail than long-time senators do, meaning it’s harder to paint them as politically undesirable based on their past voting record.

But that’s just one theory, and there are several other possible ones here.

Whether any of them will help either party in ’08 (should either nominate a governor for president) is a whole different matter.

March Of The Burn Victim Towel Animals–Parte Deux

A time or two when I was on the Catholic Answers cruise, I found a mysterious line of animals appearing in my room after dinner that appeared to be burn victims made out of towels.

It wasn’t always clear what the animals were meant to be, but I BLOGGED ABOUT IT, and folks had fun guessing what some animals were.

I’d completely forgotten about this, but tonight this little critter showed up in my bedroom . . .

Mystery_critter_1

What is it?

I actually know what it’s supposed to be. (The cabin steward told me.)

I’ll answer tomorrow (assuming I’m able to log in tomorrow).

Till then, have fun guessing!

Thought Experiment 451

Fahrenheit4513 In his book Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury imagined a tyrannical, all controlling government with absolute power over the media and a deep animosity toward the written word… toward books. In this future society, people get all their information through state run radio and television, and books are prohibited. Those who secretly keep books are arrested, and all books are burned.

Let’s say that this actually comes about. Imagine that some future world government is completely successful in eliminating all books – including all copies of the Bible. Let’s add to Bradbury’s vision the proposition that this government also completely destroys all personal computers and, of course, the Internet.

Now the Bible exists only in the minds of those who know and remember it (this is actually an element of Bradbury’s story, too. The main character meets a kind of secret society, where people keep entire books alive in their heads, having memorized them verbatim). The Church goes underground, once again, her sacraments performed only  in secret.

Imagine further that this oppressive regime is toppled, and that the Bible can once more be printed with freedom. The Underground Church comes out of hiding and coordinates an effort to begin printing and distributing the Bible again. The text (in several translations) is re-assembled from the memories of many people, and checked against the memories of many other people. It wouldn’t even take that long… a surprising number of people have committed whole books to memory in real life. Huge numbers of people can recite from memory individual chapters and passages.

The thought experiment is this; what authority – if any – would this new Bible have? Where would this authority come from, as far as future generations are concerned? It would be based, not on a constant, uninterrupted written tradition, but on oral tradition. Later readers, in asking how they could be sure this was the authentic text, would have to be content with the answer of the current generation…"Trust us".

From a Catholic perspective, of course, the answer would be that this Bible would have precisely the same authority it always had, that is, the testimony of the Church (that’s all of us) that this is the Real Thing. In the long run, this is the only assurance we have to begin with. In order for there to be Holy Books, there must be a group, a society – a Church – that testifies "these are the Holy Books, and they are authentic". When the original autographs of the Bible texts were first preserved, copied and passed on, the only assurance people had that these books were indeed authoritative and correct was the word of the Church – those who had been taught the Apostles doctrine. Letters that made the rounds during the early Church were not all assumed to be authentic and trustworthy, unless they were verified by the testimony of the Church and compared against what was already known to be the sound doctrine of the faith… in other words, they had to be in line with the Tradition handed on through the Apostles.

This is reflected in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, where that church is warned, " not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by some prophecy, report or letter supposed to have come from us, saying that the day of the Lord has already come.". Later in that same chapter, they are reminded "… brothers, stand firm and hold to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter.". Paul later writes to Timothy, "But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it". So, the authority of the teaching is based on Who it comes from, and not whether it is written or oral.