Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
The wealth of a nation is her land (geography), her families (morality) and her constitution (system of law), in that order. Her land is a nation’s general, latent wealth. Her families and constitution are a nation’s concentrated, patent wealth whose purpose is to protect their nation’s latent wealth, her land. A nation’s constitution is purposed to protect her latent and patent wealth, land and families.
The wealth of a nation, therefore, is an integrated protection schema or stochastic structure. The schema is a correlate in culture and political philosophy of the Law of Conservation of Energy. A nation embodies dynamic power and single-pointed purpose that Law describes.
A nation is endowed and purposed to preserve herself, just as life and universe themselves are. Her duty to protect her wealth in land (geography), families (morality) and constitution (system of law) defines a nation’s character, dictates her grand national strategic objective and interests and regulates her activities among other nations.
Since the first duty of a nation is to protect her general, latent wealth — her land — the first strategic concern of a nation is to secure her borders against all manner of traffic seeking to cross them in either direction. To argue against the existence or for the weakening of a nation’s borders is to argue against a nation’s sovereignty, arguing against which is sedition and well as stupidity.
Where borders are long, choice is made between a continuous fence with fortifications at intervals (e.g., Hadrian’s Wall) and stand-alone fortifications sited to deny an enemy specific avenues of ingress (e.g., river mouths/bends, assailable coastlines and mountain passes).
The safety of the latent and patent wealth of a nation correlates with the certainty of her sovereignty. The certainty of a nation’s sovereignty correlates with the orderliness of transit at her borders. Concern for a nation’s strategic condition correlates with the safety of her wealth, that being measured as her geography, morality and system of law.
Political philosophy reflects the rational phenomenology of national existence by pointing it towards protection and expansion of national wealth. Political Philosophy translates the Law of Conservation of Energy into culture creation, as does the French aphorism plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
This is why we fight.
A successful nation comprises citizens who are strong and happy and neither self-indulgent nor puritanical. And they make jokes about one another and take them in stride good-naturedly.
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
Update 1: From Pelagius to Erasmus to Hogg, socialism (aka humanism) is an infantile and murderous theory of politics produced by and for tyrants. Its animus glares at Christianity and institutions fashioned by Christians. Socialism is a stink-eye of envy against The Church.
Between the Wars, Tillich and some Christian acquaintances tried to fix socialism by adapting it to classical Christian Logos Theology. They called it Religious Socialism. As a fix for socialism it was DOA.
The core of socialism is a narrative, a fiction, a tale, that cries happiness and wonder for all but mandates the grim and gray for most. Socialists deliberately ignore the phenomenology of paradox, the unexpected, in order to set up the many whom they expect to loot and languish.
He is right, we are not in a trade war, we are in a trade liberation.
Update 2: Well, the elite university faculty are producing increasingly violent Stalinists for a century now, especially so faculty straddling the Charles River, to the banks of which every disaster befalling the USA for at least the last 80 years can be traced.
Perhaps Mr. Eberstadt is not with one of those faculties because he is not a Stalinist. Said faculties hate Putin because he is nominally Christian and promotes Russian nationalism as Church-based.
Anytime I hear sympathy for Stalin, even droll, I hear envious hostility towards Christians.
Update 3: Luther’s Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott refers to the recent lifting of an Ottoman siege of Vienna. It is classic Luther, Paul, Jerome, Augustine and Francis: transcendent meaning in mundane event. As I recall, Luther wrote both the hymn (the words) and the tune (the music).
In fall 1968 or spring 1969 (memory vague), I stood outside the facade of St. Pat’s in NYC while Paul VI was saying Mass inside, sound piped out to us throng on 5th Avenue. And when Mass concluded, loud speakers came forth with Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott. [Memory not sure: it may have been Nun Danket Alle Gott, another great German/Lutheran Chorale, so the point stands.] My schoolmates and I, from Morningside Heights, had a knowing laugh and then joined in.
It is not technically a Hymn as English-speakers understand the term. It is a German Chorale. Another breed of cat, so to speak.
As such, the German Chorale has a character which is utterly mellifluous as well as demonstrably resolute. The German Chorale — the Lutheran Chorale in its native rendition — is similar to Welsh Choral and Scottish Bagpipe execution in requiring sustained wind, aka hyperventilation, which is a perfect summoner of sempiternal courage.
Not a few famous German/Lutheran Chorales derive from German beer hall tunes, to include the famous Passion Chorale Bach so beautifully harmonized several times. Proving once again the linkage of the vertical and horizontal components of life, a fact Luther emphasized and Lutherans, historically, typify.
Beethoven used the phenomenon of sustained wind to exegete Schiller’s poem in the final movement of the 9th Symphony.
Update 4: Michael Ledeen: The Road to Damascus:
SIDEBAR: Revolutions are not the result of economic and social misery. They are acts of hope, carried out by people who want and believe in real change. If revolution were a response to misery, Venezuela would have long since had a successful revolution. And so would Iran.
I wish that Trump and his people would embrace this strategy. I don’t think it’s necessary to bomb Syria. Our most devastating weapons are political, and the call for freedom is the most potent.
Freedom for Iran would change the Middle East, and might have global consequences. It’s a mission worthy of a president who calls for greatness.
I commented:
Good God in Heaven, Yes!
However, more broadly, USA is operating in MENA without a rational (protection of USA sovereignty) grand national strategic objective and, within that, specific national strategic interests, such as what to do about Iran and the other nations there.
Friendships tried and true and historical ties are insufficient and usually dangerous reasons to expend USA wealth. Thus the pain of NATO and of Iraq without having 10% or so of its annual oil income come to pay complete USA expenses of liberating them.
USA activity in foreign countries is irrational if it does not enhance USA national security and wealth, which is to say protect her land, her families and her constitution. By that standard, self-protection, it is a narrow gate to demonstrating, today, that USA has definitive strategic interests in MENA, much less a demonstrable strategic objective there.
(Strategic objective and strategic interests are not the same thing. Strategic interests are the specifics of implementing strategic objective.)
Update 5: John Quincy Adams, July 4, 1821: Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
Update 6: Austin Bay: Erdogan’s Turkey and Nato
Update 7: Foreign Policy magazine gnashes her teeth, good: Brazil’s Love Affair With Diplomacy Is Dead
Update 8: War games: America ‘keeps getting its ass handed to it’ by simulated Chinese, Russian attacks
Update 9: America’s Monopoly Crisis Hits the Military
Update 10: Vaclav Klaus: National Sovereignty and the Unsolvable Problem of the EU
Update 11: Sundance: Pelosi Rejects U.S. Sovereignty – U.S. Immigration Subject to Laws of “A Global Society”
Update 12: VDH: A Western Globalized Phenomenon That Citizenship Doesn’t Mean Much Anymore
Update 13: Contemplating Positions On Chinese Flanks
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
