ON HATING YOUR CHILDREN.

By Paul Merkley.

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 On Hating Our Children and Being Applauded For It.

What must be the future of a civilization whose most privileged voices are celebrated for declaring that they hate their children and that they have told them so? 

Here is the link : https://www.macleans.ca/regretful-mothers.

And here, to spare you, are a few salient lines:

French psychotherapist Corine Maier stoked an international firestorm and condemnation in 2008 with her manifesto No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children. Her two children, the manifesto proclaims, left her bankrupt and exhausted. 

Also summoned to the spotlight to receive applause is “Isabella Dutton, a 57-year-old British mother of two grown children [who] created a furor with a Daily Mail  Essay headlined: ‘The mother who says having these two children is the biggest regret of my life.’”

These researchers  have cornered a number of mothers who describe the happy day when they sat their “kids” down and explained that they hated everything about them. “Hated” is the very word they use. In the words of one, the new life of liberation began with discovering that “their amazing life comes at the expense of my own.” This heart-stopping truth – this truth which Maclean’s  magazine imagines is the hottest bit of psychology off the press — has been the homeliest of home-truths, proclaimed by our ancestors back in cave -man time.  But now expunged is all sense that something of priceless value has been gained in exchange for this “expense.”

Children are Exhausting.

Maclean’s refers us to “a French psychotherapist Corinne Maier [who] stoked an international firestorm and condemnation in 2008 with her manifesto No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children; her two children left her ‘exhausted and bankrupt,’ and she couldn’t wait for them to leave home, she wrote.” And there is “Isabella Dutton, a 57-year-old British mother of two grown children [who] created furor with a Daily Mail essay headlined: ‘The mother who says having these two children is the biggest regret of her life.’”

A special heroine of the anti-motherhood cause is Lauren Byrne, who “rejects the idealized script, and with it the silencing of mothers. That’s why she set up her Facebook page, she says: ‘Everyone was talking about how fantastic it was. And I was, “Who are you people?’ I’m exhausted. … Even saying you want time away from your kids is verboten… People say, ‘You shouldn’t say that. They’re blessings. You should feel lucky.’ But it’s not unicorns and rainbows all the time. But women can’t complain that ‘this is really hard’ because people think you’re a bad mom.”

Angela, who lives in Newfoundland, went for months with debilitating undiagnosed post-partum after the premature birth of twins. She felt cheated, she told Maclean’s, when she didn’t experience the instant bond she was told mothers are supposed to have. ‘I felt I had been robbed.’ She wasn’t prepared for the difficulties: ‘Everyone talks about motherhood like it’s this wonderful thing and you’re going to love those children the second they come out,’ she says. ‘Nobody talks about how hard having children can be, how exhaustion can affect you and how sometimes love has to be developed.’ She doesn’t feel she can be candid, even with health professionals.”

 **Discovering Sex and Suffering and Motherhood.

Imagine telling your children that you hate them, that you regret ever having born them, and that your wish they were out of your way for ever! This is exactly what these exemplary Canadian mothers have told Maclean’s  magazine that they have done. These are people who imagine that their generation invented love and sex and suffering. They are, in short, people with no sense of history. In more seemly times homicidal intention along this line, with the right names embedded, would lead immediately to calling in the police.

But all of this is to the good: “In pushing the boundaries of accepted maternal response, women are challenging an explosive taboo.”

As to how these children –no doubt now famous among their peers at school – reacted to Mother’s refreshing declaration, we are left to our own imaginations. 

***Some Demographic Realities.

Since 1971, the fertility rate in Canada has dropped from 2.1—the replacement level needed for the population to renew itself without immigration—to 1.6 in 2016. Maclean’s“ scholarly source explains the decline in fertility rates to “older, more educated first-time mothers.” “Being older than mothers used to be in previous generations, these better-educated, mothers,  Maclean’s believes  are “entitled to expect a bigger boost from the experience of child-bearing.”

There is a revealing line of thought! No until this jaded, morally-bankrupt generation has anyone stooped to describing child-birth as about “a bigger boost!”

And why are precious upper-income, better-educated women entitled to anything more than their less educated peers? The thinking here is downright feudal – and very ugly.

These older but not wiser mothers confront the reality of motherhood just like all mother before them: “incontinence,  boredom , weight gain, saggy breasts, depression, the end of romance, the lack of sleep, dumbing own “ (that is, adjusting  to the intellectual demands of conversing with infants and toddlers.)

But this cohort of educated mothers is, we repeat, “entitled” to exemption from the experience of women down through the ages. So they are fighting back. There is a  Facebook community having more than 2,600 members founded by Lauren  Byrne, a 32-year-old ER nurse and mother of two who lives in Newfoundland. “Angela, who lives in Newfoundland, went for months with debilitating undiagnosed post-partum after the premature birth of twins. She felt cheated, she told Maclean’s, when she didn’t experience the instant bond she was told mothers are supposed to have.”

I Work, Therefore I Am.”

Isn’t it amazing that this cohort, described as educated several levels above the level of mothers of yore, should have to start so far before the starting line of all these other mothers in the matter of common folklore about having babies! Maclean’s  ideal of a mother takes out all of her rage at the low-down-ness of it all – and they take it out against the appropriate object: the children. Dealing with the ugly truth of mother hood, “Augustine Brown says she ‘s candid with the children, telling them that being a mother is not the most important aspect of her life. They know that It (that is, the most import aspect of her life) “ties with my work and who I  am… They cry when I leave [on a vacation by myself]…  but I feel it is important for them to know they’re not the centre of the world.” 

Another Mother tells her children that she “hates them for having prevented her from becoming a success in life.”

What room is there for doubting the long-term future of Canada, in light of this testimony of the best and the brightest—the people who have for half-a-century-or-so turned out Maclean’s  magazine?  

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THE TWO FACES OF VENEZUELA

By Paul Merkley.

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Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

Plato
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When you set the googlim to searching for VENEZUELA AND MUSIC they will drop into your lap items that describe in terms of excitement the good work being done in Venezuela by its music program in the schools.

One is struck immediately by an embarrassing contrast to the situation here in Canada where music has always been a poor relation, God-only-knows-how-many notches below sports in the “academic” pecking order. The actual content of “music studies,” where these exist at all in any school draws mostly upon commercial-popular music, rather than upon  the classical heritage.

By contrast (according to Reuters, in an article from a decade ago), “Venezuela’s youth orchestras and choirs have helped thousands of children resist thug life in some of South America’s most violent slums, and now wealthy countries are lining up to emulate the system.” The Reuters reporter notes a great irony here: “Governments from Los Angeles to Scotland may not much like President Hugo Chavez’s brand of Cuba-inspired socialism but they will soon try to replicate Venezuela’s achievements on their own streets… Teachers say the system markedly reduces truancy in slums with some of the highest murder rates in the world… There are now orchestras being formed in Venezuela’s almost lawless prisons.”

“The System” was inaugurated in 1975, and has thus been around long enough that it is tempting to imagine the effects of music training ramifying through the schools and working a massive transformation of the economic, social and political life of the land. But anyone who has been paying attention to Venezuela’s political, economic and cultural life of Venezuela knows that the national life is not governed by that “moral law” that Plato said radiated from the study of music. In fact, Venezuela today presents quite a desperate picture.

Just a few days ago, President Nicolas Maduro announced a 95 percent devaluation of the country’s currency – just the latest in a series of perverse governmental actions intended to head off an economic crisis caused by falling oil prices, but in reality leading to a massive exodus of economic refugees.

Sadly, the public life of Venezuela has been sliding downwards towards hell just about as long as The System has been pouring its graduates into Venezuelan society.

Without doubt, the most widely celebrated graduate of the System is Gustavo Dudamel, 38, today Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the superstar Guest Conductor of just about every major orchestra this season. Precisely because of his unmatched fame he is being called upon today to speak out about the political reality  in Venezuela. But he won’t be moved. This week, Gustavo Dudamel told the Los Angeles Times that he is simply “a musician. If I were a politician, I would act as a politician for my own interest. But I’m an artist, and an artist should act for everybody.” Grandiose and cowardly at the same time! That very week, six people had lost their lives in Venezuela amid protests against what another Venezuelan musician, pianist Gabriela Montera, calls the “organised thuggery” of Nicolas Maduro’s government.

Poignantly, these protests occurred precisely as Dudamel was conducting a concert to celebrate the 39th year of The System.

Without claiming to know how Venezuelan musicians should discharge their political duties, we certainly have a right to point up the failure of the most thoroughly democratic music-education system in the world to affect political realities under what would seem to be nearly-ideal conditions. With Gustavo Dudamel leading the parade, the children of The System are moving in lock-step celebration of the dictator, Nicolas Maduro. Yet, there seems to be nearly-universal agreement that Maduro cannot long preside over a government so incompetent and so venal that prices are rising at an annualized rate of over 100,000 percent!

Since the opening of the French ‘Revolutionary Era three centuries ago, the prosperity of music and musicians has generally been seen to follow from political stability and that has meant, for the most part, singing the praises of extant political regimes. Confronted by critics on the matter of his apparent political apathy, Dudamel says: “We are creating in Sistema not only musicians but better citizens. We exchange instruments for guns. We teach tolerance and respect….I’m a musician. If I were a politician, I would act as a politician for my own interest. But I’m an artist, and an artist should act for everybody.”

 Unless musicians of the stature of Dudamel discharge the responsibility of political leadership that goes with their cultural eminence they risk seeing the rapid collapse of their cultural eminence.

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ISLAM WINS BY FAILING.

By Paul Merkley.

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One giant clue to the future of us all is bound up in the accredited fact that the world’s Muslim population is growing  twice as rapidly as its non-Muslim population.

History presents many examples of a Muslim minority growing to become a majority within the same boundaries. A current case is Nigeria. With a population of just under two hundred million, it is   the largest country in Africa, and is in fact the seventh largest country by population in the world. Also, according to the Pew Research Center, Nigeria, with more than 80 million Christians, has the largest Christian population on the African continent. Now, set that statistic  side by-side-wide wit this one: “there were more recorded killings of Christians due to their faith in northern Nigeria in 2015 than in the rest of the world put together.” Thus we see a real statistical possibility that Nigeria will become a Muslim nation by 2050 and the method by which that will be accomplished will be the method recommended by Muhammad and adopted by his followers on the day after Muhammad died: conversion by violent force and the menace of death by the sword.

Yes, there is the sword. And there is the cradle. Globally, Muslims have the highest fertility rate: an average of 3.1 children per woman—well above replacement level (2.1.) Globally again, Christians are second in this matter, at 2.7 children per woman. The global average for all groups distinguished by the population experts is 2.5. Groups having fertility levels lower than this number will require converts to sustain their present numbers.

The fastest-growing religions today are Islam (1.8% per annum, from a very large base), Baha’I (1.7%, from a very small base), Sikhism, Jainism, and Hinduism (all about 1.5%, from a  very large base), and Christianity (1.3%, from a base calculated to include nearly 1\3 of the world’s population.) Thus, while the reproductive rate of Muslims is increasing, the reproductive rate of Christians and all others is declining.

Two scholarly predictions in particular might be noticed: If current trends continue, by 2050 the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world, while in Europe, Muslims will make up 10% of the overall population. In the United States, Muslims will be more numerous in the U.S. than people who identify as Jewish on the basis of religion (the group presently reckoned as belonging to the largest non-Christian religion.)

There were approximately 19 million Muslims in the European Union in 2010 (about 3.8%). This number is increasing, owing to immigration and higher birth rates. Muslim women today have an average of 2.2 children compared to an estimated average of 1.5 children for non-Muslim women in Europe. At this rate,

Muslims will make up more than 10% of the total population in 10 European countries including Russia (14.4%), France (10.3%) and Belgium (10.2%).

Both In Britain and in France, conversions of nominal Christians to Islam  have doubled in the past quarter century. At the same time, it is equally important to notice that the best studies estimate that significantly more people have converted from Islam to Christianity in the 21st century than at any other point in Islamic history, while the numbers of those who have moved from Islam to “no religion” are also increasing.

In Europe, the debate over immigration has caused drastic reduction of voter support for all of the political parties which participated in the Governments of Europe that welcomed the mass migration of 2011 and following. New “Populist” – that is, anti –Immigrant –parties are now participating in government.

The fantasy of “liberal” or “progressive” Islam, inspired by the Arab Spring of 2011, has dissolved, without a trace, while the menace of Islamic terrorism has been repeatedly validated. Young men have sworn allegiance to the country that has welcomed them and even given them citizenship and have then left the country to pick up training in terror in North Africa or the Middle East – and have then returned and left again and returned again without hindrance.

At the same time, politics in Central Europe, where attitudes towards immigration were already hostile four years ago, has confirmed in power the politicians who stood against “liberalizing” immigration so that Eastern Europe could be seen as matching in “humanity” Western Europe.

East European people are being criticized by more “progressive” Western nations for not wanting to take in Muslim refugees. Chief among them is Hungary, where recent politics has been dominated by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.  Because he stands publicly for the  policy of restricting immigration of Muslims to Hungary – and because he does so in the name of “preserving  its Christian identity,” Orbán  is tarred as “xenophobic.”

According to  Prime Minister Orbán:

We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see….

Orbán makes frequent reference to Islam’s fateful conquest and occupation of Hungary from 1541 to 1699.  Then, Islamic triumphalism and persecution of Christians were the order of the day.

Our Western editorialists are vague about this story. In an article titled “Hungary has been shamed by Viktor Orbán’s government,” the Guardian mocks and trivializes the prime minister’s position:

The Ottoman empire is striking back, [Orbán] warns. They’re taking over! Hungary will never be the same again!

The Washington Post acknowledges that Hungary was occupied by the Ottomans, way back when, but ponders: “it’s somewhat bizarre to think this rather distant past of warlords and rival empires ought to influence how a 21st century nation addresses the needs of refugees.”

It is not edifying to notice how ruthlessly currently- eminent commentators in our midst dismiss appeal to History – not only in the present case but as a general rule. This contempt for history is the largest factor explaining the incompetence of the minds who dominate our media.

Of course, it matters that Central Europe and much of Eastern Europe and the Slavic world were once conquered by Islam, and for the most part, were enslaved by that religion for several centuries until their native rulers rallied the people whom they ruled behind promise of restoring Christianity to their daily lives and drove Islam out of Europe—hopefully for ever.

As for the canard that Orbán is a closet anti –Semite, the best  rejoinder is  Orban’s address to the World Jewish Congress Orbán  opening address to the World Jewish Congress earlier this year.  http://www.mfa.gov.hu /World+Jewish+Congress.]

Is it truly alarmist, as our media masters claim, to speak of Islam’s slow march to majority position in our part of the world?

Fr. Daniel Byantoro, an Indonesian convert to Christianity, has summed up for Western readers the story of Islam’s place in the history of Indonesia.

For thousands of years my country (Indonesia) was a Hindu Buddhist kingdom.  The last Hindu king was kind enough to give a tax exempt property for the first Muslim missionary to live and to preach his religion. Slowly the followers of the new religion were growing, and after they became so strong the kingdom was attacked, those who refused to become Muslims had to flee for their life… Slowly from the Hindu Buddhist Kingdom, Indonesia became the largest Islamic country in the world. If there is any lesson to be learnt by Americans at all, the history of my country is worth pondering upon.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260119/muslim-refugees-and-terrorism-america-daniel-greenfield

The underlying reality behind this trahison des clercs is that our elites long ago turned their backs on Christianity and Judaism  faith. Reference to the historical faith has been expunged from the curriculum – except for stories illustrating our persecution of aboriginal peoples and our liquidation of the ancient wisdom of aboriginal people. This multi-generational policy has laid the foundation of contempt for Christian heritage

Hundreds of thousands of refugees are in flight today from the historical and present ravages of Islam. They are the latest victims of Islam’s incapability to provide the bases for decent civil government. No one ever asks: Why is such traffic one-way? Why are there never masses of Americans, Brits, Europeans flooding into the countries of the East?

It is the incompetence of Islam that explains the flight of Muslim masses from Africa and from Middle East–   and which, incidentally, creates the opportunity for expressions of philanthropic concern that are concocted without reference to the fact of Islam’s incompetence.

Before ISIS had been purged from Iraq, Iraq had lost 80-90% of its Christian population. The city of Baghdad, which had held 600,000 Christians about a century ago, now held only 150,000.

Many ancient Christian churches as well as hundreds of Christian homes had been razed in Mosul, previously an area of major Christian concentration. None of the persons and organizations whom these Christians had hoped to hear express outrage at their condition uttered a peep. In large part, this is because our governments and other authorities, not wishing to appear unaware of the great crime of colonialism, had bought into the canard that churches in then East are the products of missionaries. Of course, they are not! in fact, most of the Eastern churches were in place at least a millennium before the Protestant Reformation happened.

Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II – a priest of one of those indigenous Eastern Churches – says now that there is a “real danger” that Christianity could just become a “museum” in the Middle East.

Only the Government of Hungary, among all the governments of Europe, has committed itself to action for the salvation of Iraqi Christianity from genocide. This it has done by opening a school for displaced Christians in Erbil, Hungary’s Minister of Human Resources, Zoltan Balog, attended the event.

This act provides a powerful clue to what makes Hungary’s official behavior so different from that of other European governments. And that, in turn, provides a power clue to why  Hungary is so routinely despised by our opinion elites.

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WHAT I OWE TO ZIONISM.

By Paul Merkley.

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One day in the early Spring of 1979 there appeared an item on the Department of History of Carleton University bulletin board (just a few steps down from my splendid and spacious office), drawing attention to a forthcoming teaching exchange, open to my University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Just imagine! Me and Gwen and our four children living in Jerusalem, our accommodation paid for by the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University – in exchange for a little lecturing on favorite topics!

It came completely out of the blue!  Gwen signed on after minimal discussion, and the children, ranging from six years old to 18, seemed keen – or at least, they pretended to be. Gwen quickly set to the herculean effort of getting six of us packed and organized. Each of us would be allowed one suitcase, for six months! If we forget Amy’s stuffed animal toy (Sylvester) it would be the end of the world. We would have to find  an English or French-language school in Jerusalem that was open to a Canadian child at Grade One level. We would have to get passports and medical records for all six of us. If we failed to get Michele enrolled as an exchange student at Hebrew University; if we could not work out the procedure for Sharon and for Bob to fulfil in Jerusalem the requirements for their High School year here at home — it would all fall apart.

I had originally assumed that there would be many candidates, and that my candidacy would likely be the least attractive to the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University. But already the chilly effect of anti-Zionism was closing down reason in  all of the professional organizations and the chattering class, so that the thought of living in the Jewish State had little lustre – I mean, in comparison with Italy or Spain or Germany. Non-Jewish candidates like ourselves were a special rarity.

In fact, all four of my children, as well as their mother, came away from our semester in Jerusalem with at least a rudimentary  understanding of the Jewish legacy and a strong commitment to honoring the Jewish people.

Years later, I learned that the field of contestants for that exchange visit in 1980 came down to me! The low prestige of Zionism among academics was already being born out by hassles that take place, year after year, in the various professional and academic associations, where Resolutions of denunciation of Israel for its alleged ongoing crimes against the “Palestinian people” and measures intended to make sure that the members of the various associations never have to break bread with visiting Israelis.

Seeking the company of Zionists is considered very poor form by those who provide direction in the company of academics and intellectuals today. Back in the days of my active teaching at Carleton University, I would make my way every day past an array of fierce anti-Zionist propaganda, contributed by the Student Council and affiliated Arab and Muslim advocacy groups. I cannot say that my vocal Zionism has de-railed my career. But it certainly has not helped it.

As for me, that semester began forty years of steadily deepening commitment to the study of Judaism and the History of the Jews.  I have subsequently undertaken ten trips in all back to Israel – mainly to the visit the Central Zionist Archives. Three scholarly-academic books eventually came out of this research.

All of this immersion and re-immersion  in the History of Israel and in the present State of Israel has simultaneously strengthened my Christian faith. It led me, about two decades after my initial visit, to active membership in the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, which  vigorously advocates on behalf of Israel in the churches. Meanwhile the leaders of the so-called called “mainline” churches have been slipping deeper and deeper into pro- “Palestinian ” advocacy – a hegira that inevitably undoes the commitment to history, to theology and  to truth.

Immersion in the History of Israel should not be undertaken lightly. It is extremely difficult to concentrate the minds of European and American and Canadian and British historians on the simple but powerful fact of the immensity of the History of Zion. There are, for example,  roughly three-and-a-half-millennia more History packed into the History of Israel than there is in the distinguished History from which Canada emerges!

We Christians cannot hope to understand the Jewish identity unless we at least make an effort to sort out the story of the Ancient Egyptians, the Ancient Akkadians, the Ancient Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks and the Romans,  as well as a succession of Islamic Empires and the British Empire.

And then there is the story of the Creation of the State of Israel, Seventy Years Ago this May.

Quite apart from this matter of the longevity of the record of Israel, there is the simple fact that the History of Zionism carries us right down to the present day. It is full to bursting of the biographies of incredibly heroic men who  committed their entire lives to a cause that was generally regarded as hopeless in their own time. I think of Theodor Herzl, who said of his commitment in 1897 to the impossible programme of Zionism: “He who wants to be right in thirty years must be thought crazy for the first two weeks.” And I think of Chaim Weizmann, and David Ben Gurion and the other giants who dominate Israel’s public life in our own time. Heroism on the scale of that which each and every one of these contributed to their Cause is rare at any time and is virtually extinct today – as far as I can see. For this reason alone, I recommend the study of the lives of the major Zionist figures.

The story leading to the establishment of the modern State of Israel is a bright line running through all of recorded History for the last three millennia and more. An understanding of the roots of Zionism takes serious scholars back to Biblical times, when the Jewish people slowly got used to the idea of being a distinct people, separated by God for a particular purpose.

Zionism is the word that correctly describes the process that brought Israel back to existence as a nation in 1948 after many centuries of diaspora. Zionism is the correct word for the spirit of loyalty that has sustained her ever since, despite her patently impossible situation, surrounded by an utterly hostile world which Jews are not permitted to enter.

Working on the story of Zionism is not a matter for the faint of heart. “Zionism” is there in the earlies books of tanaach – Hebrew Scripture. It is the force that gives meaning to the disjointed troubles of the Patriarchs. It is the Cause to which the LORD calls David and the Prophets. It sustained the People of God thereafter through three millennia of challenges. And in my own lifetime it has issued in the re-establishment of the People of Israel in eretz Israel – where their history began.

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