Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
94
95
96
Even when I was almost forty years ago living in Turkey, the Turkish
colonels and generals with whom I worked often proudly told me
that, We Turks ruled Jerusalem for 550 years! -- the Seljuk and
the Ottoman Turks. It was also then that I learned that Turkey was
the third country to recognize the Zionist State of Israel, after the
Soviet Union and the United States.
Back between the years 1966-1967 and 2001, when I spoke to
Colonel Jaureguiberry, I was awakened to something even more
sobering, however, and with graver implications for the Catholic
Faith and for the culture that this Faith has fecundated and enrooted
and fostered forth. I speak of the events of 1992 -- 500 years after
the Christian Re-Reconquista of 2 January 1492, which was followed
by the expulsion of the Jews on 2 August and the setting sail of
Columbus on his first voyage to the New World, the very next day,
3 August 1492.
Undo 1492
During that 500th Anniversary year of 1992 -- after the formal
dissolution of the Soviet Union -- there was an astonishingly
concerted effort of harsh and mendacious propaganda To Undo
1492!
The Mohammedans, the Jews, and the Revolutionary
Indigenists and Socialists and Defenders of the Pre-Colomban Aztec
Empire all effectively shouted, Undo 1492!
There was so much pressure on Pope John Paul II,
apparently, that he consented to suspend, or even more indefinitely
to cancel, the ongoing Canonization process of Queen Isabella of
Spain, whom William Thomas Walsh called, the Last Crusader.
If one steps back to consider this three-pronged attack to
Undo 1492!, one may suddenly realize that the common grandstrategic (not just military-strategic) target is the Catholic Church;
both the supernatural faith itself and the intimate culture and larger
Christian civilization that flows from that Faith. The Faith is not
reducible to culture, but the Faith always produced culture -variegated cultures that are rooted and marked by slow fruitfulness,
and hence always vulnerable and at risk and in need of a loving
defense. The Incarnation of Christian Chivalry always essentially
97
says: the more defenseless someone is, the more that one calls out
for our defense. So, too, with the purity and integrity of the Faith
and with the precious but precarious culture which the Faith has so
variously produced.
How, then, should we consider the proper Catholic strategic
response to the battle cry, Undo 1492!? If someone is at war
with you, even if you do not know it, you are at war. Reality is that
which does not go away, even when you stop thinking about it.
Faithful to the past
Under the current conditions of disorder, within and outside the
Church especially, what is the Catholic strategic response to efforts
to undo the conquest of the Moslems, to undo the expulsion of the
Jews, and to undo the purported ill-effects of Columbus missionary
journeys to the New World?
The first thing that the informed Catholic strategist must do is have
a true and properly proportioned understanding of the past and the
grave issues that led up to the final decisions and implementing
events of 1492. The first cardinal virtue -- the virtue of prudence -is certainly the strategists virtue, par excellence, in the practical
order -- or in the realm of practical wisdom -- the recta ratio
agibilium, whereby knowledge of reality is converted into the
realization of the good, especially the bonum commune, the
common good. And, one of the requirements of prudentia is a
memoria fidelis, namely a memory faithful to the truth of the past.
To see things as they truly were, in proper proportion and in the
specific composition of the concrete context of the real life and
besetting actualities of the time -- that is part of the discipline of
true prudence!
The threats that Queen Isabel had to deal with for the thirty years
she ruled (1474-1504) are still with us today, and perhaps even
magnified -- and, so, we will be helped by the study of history.
98
Godmother of America
If we understand better the context of her time and the decisive
issues and events that shaped her prudential and strategic
responses, we may better grasp what is required of us, amidst a
growing international Muslim insurgency (not just terrorism) and
amidst the deft political action of Jewish forces, and their subversive
religious actions, too. And there are other, uprooting revolutionary
developments which we may also fittingly come to consider, insofar
as they are enemies of the Catholic Faith and the Catholic Church
in the full and undiluted meaning of those two substantive phrases -without any amorphousness or ambiguity or equivocation.
Resisting an alien intrusion upon the Catholic Kingship of France,
Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431, only twenty years
before Isabel of Spain was born -- on 22 April 1451. And two years
after her birth -- in the momentous year of 1453 A.D. -- the
Mohammedans conquered Constantinople and soon threatened
Western Europe, as well -- and mightily encouraged the resilience of
the Moslems (and their Jewish allies) in Spain. Given what Isabel
later did as Queen -- to oppose the alien presence of the Moslems
and the much more insidious Jewish Perfidians she herself, in many
ways, is the Joan of Arc of Spain. And, perhaps, some day she will
be known as Saint Isabel; after her own long-belated canonization,
as was also the case with Saint Joan herself. Moreover, in light of
what Isabel did to support and commission the visionary Columbus,
she is also, in the reverent words of William Thomas Walsh, The
Godmother of America.1
Catholic Castile?
William Thomas Walsh helps us see what it was like in Castile,
Spain in the mid-fifteenth century, when Isabel was a young woman
of eleven, and before she became Queen at twenty-three years of
age, in 1474. Walsh is describing the reign of King Enrique IV, the
William Thomas Walsh, Isabella of Spain: The Last Crusader (New York:
Robert McBride and Company, 1930), 515 pages. This beautiful and
profound and lucidly written book should be read by anyone who studies in
order to learn the truth. On page xiii of his FOREWARD, Professor Walsh
calls Isabel Americas godmother.
1
99
100
Aragon. Human life was very cheap. Contact with Moslems [as well
as the Jews] profoundly modified the influence of the Christian Church
among the people; polygamy, for example, was not uncommon,
though it usually took the form of open concubinage. And the Jews,
although possessors of a far nobler moral code than the
Mohammedans, acted everywhere as a powerful dissolvent...of the
Christian faith which was the foundation of the morality of the people
among whom they lived. Many of the clergy were depraved. And the
Court [of Enrique IV] was unspeakably foul. Isabel was disgusted by
what she saw and heard there. But for the present her youth
protected her.3
In even more trenchant words, Professor Walsh says:
Public and private morality had never been so low since Christianity
came into the land. The stench of the court began to pervade the air
of all Spain.4
Now, we may further appreciate what the undoing of 1492" might
return us to! A terrible thing to think upon! (In the words of Father
Francois Rabelais).
A fifth column
In the slow resurrection of Christian Spain and in a society that took it
for granted that heresy was a sin worse than murder, 5 Queen Isabel
was morally obligated to suppress the secret Jews (the insincere,
false, deceitfully subversive Conversos, or New Christians), to
conduct a ten-year Crusade against the Mohammedans, and to use
the Inquisition as a war measure, against the strategic salient, the
wedge into Western Europe, that the Moslems and their antiChristian abettors (Fautors!) had made. She had to face the
problem of hostile exterior lines and treacherous interior lines.
(The United States is also coming to understand more about these
matters, and not only because of its porous borders and interior
3
Ibid., p. 14.
101
102
If you were the Lone Ranger, would you rather have Ledeen or
Tonto beside you in the final battle against the circumambient
Indians? What do you mean, we, Ledeen?
In an even more candid book -- especially in his rare and revealing
Chapter 5 on Nationalistic Judaism -- the former head of Israeli
Military Intelligence, Yehoshafat Harkabi says:
In Nachmanidess (1194-1270) commentary on Maimonidess (11351204) Book of Commandments: We are commanded to inherit the
land [i.e., Eretz Yisreal -- the Greater Israel] that God gave to
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and must not leave it in the hands of any
other nation, .... We must not leave the land in the hands of the
[seven Canaanite nations] or of any other people in any generation. 8
Although the learned General Harkabi strongly opposed the
Yabotinsky-Begin ethos and the intransigent religious factions that
root their views in the principles of the Great Sage, Maimonides, he
usefully quotes him:
The major task that confronted the Jewish sages after the destruction
of the Second Temple [by the Romans, in 70 A.D.] and the repression
of the Bar Kochba Rebellion(132-135 C.E.) was to guarantee the
survival of the Jewish people [as distinct from the original Jewish
faith?] in a hostile milieu. As they saw it, in order to survive the Jews
had to isolate themselves from their surroundings. They enacted this
intention in the HALAKHA the body of religious laws designed to
encode a unique and binding lifestyle. Jewish uniqueness, deeply
rooted in the Jewish religious consciousness, now received precise
external expression in all details of life, as stipulated in the Talmud,
the principal repository of Jewish laws. Maimonides summarized:
[Jews] should not follow the customs of the Gentiles, ... as it has been
said: And ye shall not walk in the customs of the nations which I cast
out before you (Leviticus 20:23).9
Michael A. Ledeen, (New York: Saint Martins Press, 2002), pp. 29-30 -my emphasis added.
7
Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israels Fateful Hour (New York: Harper and Row,
1988 -- revised and updated edition), p. 144. Chapter 5, pp. 158-194,
should be read very carefully.
8
103
10
11
104
Ibid., p. 158.
13
The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1904), Volume
XI, p. 485.
14
15
105
17
106
19
107
21
Ibid., p. 195.
22
Ibid., p. 196.
23
Ibid., p. 197.
108
be enforced. It was so plain that they were above the law that the
Cathari of Leon used to circumcize themselves that they may freely
teach as Jews the heresy for which they would be punished as
Christians.25
The situation was such that, even in the fifteenth century shortly
before Isabels reign, it was true that:
Confident and secure, the Jews lived with all the oriental ostentation of
which their luxurious nature is capable. They took no particular pains
to conceal their contempt for the lesser breeds without the law, who
paid them tribute.26 [Remember Maimonides!]
However, the Jewish population in Isabels time had shrunk from
some 5,000,000 or more to about 200,000.27 Two and a half
million, at least, had become New Christians (Conversos), and
some were sincere, but more of them were activated by fear under
persecution, or by motives of self-interest, and, according to a
Jewish scholar, Dr. Meyer Kayserling:
Their conversion was, however, only external, or feigned; at heart they
adhered loyally to their ancestral religion.
Though outwardly
Christians, they secretly observed the tenets of the Jewish faith. 28
That is to say, deceit was pervasive and provocative -- further
exacerbated by Jewish condescension and contempt. And, on top
of that,
What cannot be questioned, however, is that Conversos and their kin
everywhere controlled business, government, taxation, all that was
valuable, just as their ancestors had as Jews. ... For as Conversos, the
Jews were now capable of doing greater injury to Christianity through
24
Ibid.
25
26
27
Ibid., p. 200.
Ibid., p. 200 Walsh gives the specific citation, as well, for Kayserlings
candid commentary.
28
109
their influence upon the Old Christians with whom they mingled.
29
Expulsion
The original day for the expulsion and departure of the Spanish Jews
was 1 July 1492, and they made their careful and resourceful
preparations, those who declined to be baptized. About this new
Diaspora, William Thomas Walsh writes very compassionately
and movingly because it is a forced dispersion:
When the appointed day approached the time had been extended
by the King and Queen to August 2 [one day before Columbus
departed on his first voyage to America] the Israelites caused all the
boys and girls over twelve years of age to marry, so that each girl
might go under the protection of a husband. And so, putting all their
glory behind them, and confiding in the vain hope of their blindness,
wrote the curate of Los Palacios [Bernaldez], they gave themselves
over to the travail, and went forth from the lands of their birth. ... And
there was no Christian who did not grieve for them. Everywhere the
people invited them to be baptized...but the rabbis encouraged them
and caused the women and boys to sing and play tambourines and
timbrels to make the people merry. 30
This is certainly not the way the Israelis when they now have a
state and protected power treat their Christian and Muslim
Palestinians. The Israelis have shown no such compassion or
support when they have decided upon their own forced expulsions
of minorities, after the preparatory actions of contempt and
intimidation and terror! As always, contrast clarifies the mind.
Walsh continues his moving narrative by first quoting Father
Bernaldez again:
At last they [who were to embark from Puerto de Santa Maria and
Cadiz] set sail in 25 ships, but had to bribe the pirate Fragosa with
10,000 ducats -- evidently they had found some way to defeat the
royal order concerning money to let them sail for Cartagena [inside
Gibraltar on the Mediterranean Seacoast of Murcia, Spain to the
29
Ibid.
30
110
Ibid., p. 370.
111
33
112
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid.
37
The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnal, 1904), Volume
113
114
Cromwell
Quoting some other frank Jewish scholars, Professor Walsh has a
further-revealing, extended footnote:
[Anti-Catholic, Calvinist Oliver] Cromwell was by no means
unacquainted with the resources and wide activities of the rich
Sephardi Jews of the Continent, says Albert M. Hyamson in his
History of the Jews in England, p. 176. The Spanish and Portuguese
trade [and economic intelligence network?] was in their hands; the
Levant trade also to a considerable extent. Jews helped to found the
Hamburg Bank [one of the main cities of the Hanseatic League], and
were closely connected with the Dutch East and West Indian
Companies. As bullion merchants, also, Jews were prominent, and, in
addition, many of them owned fleets of merchantmen. The second
reason for Cromwells favor was the great assistance these crypto-Jews
of London and their agents on the Continent were to the [regicide]
government of the [Judaizing, Neo-Messianic] Commonwealth. And,
when employing them on secret service, he was aware of their true
faith.40
Origin of Liberalism
Because the remainder of this extended footnote is so important
and nuanced and full of implication, I propose to continue quoting it
to the shocking end, and then comment. Walsh himself, before
quoting others, says:
Carvajal, a secret Jew who went to England as Portuguese
ambassador, was enormously wealthy, and placed a whole army of
continental agents and spies at the disposal of Cromwell [perhaps to
aid his cruelly unspeakable, Moor-like operations in Ireland?]. The
share of the Jews in promoting the Protestant Reformation is pointed
out by Rabbi Lewis Browne in Stranger than Fiction, p. 248 et seq.
Luther, he observes, studied Hebrew with Reuchlin, a pupil of Jewish
scholars in Italy, and the Jews, by their very presence in Europe ... had
helped to bring the heresy into being. But once it was born they let it
severely alone. Browne is right, too, in discerning that Liberalism is of
Jewish origin. It was little wonder that the enemies of social progress
Ibid., pp 503-504 footnote number 8 to Chapter XXXII my emphasis
added.
40
115
116
117
43
44
118
119
120
48
49
121
game?
50
51
52
122
53
54
55
Ibid., p. 67.
56
Ibid., p. 74.
123
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
124
cringed before the spectacle of the end of the world? Death, a violent
death in battle or under the sacrificial knife was the only relief
from this infernal life [without hope]. Battles were frequently waged
for no other reason than to feed these sacrificial altars where
adolescent girls, children and prisoners of war were ritualistically
immolated. This is the nauseating legacy of the Aztec civilization. 59
For the new Ideological Indigenism and romantic Comparative
Anthropology, there is a great desire to destroy the blight of
Catholic Christianity and to help undo 1492" especially the
Christian spiritual exploitation that Columbus purportedly set in
motion.
Such an undoing promises the return of a New
Revolutionary Naturalism.
After citing some specific events and subtle mockeries from The
Autumn of the Patriarch, Boixados comments:
By such a succession of incidents Marquez subtly dismembers the
supernatural order; more than once, events [are said to] occur under
the golden dome of the deceitful world of that difficult God, the one
and triune. ... Can one so easily dismiss the profound and irreverent
subversion of the natural and supernatural order. ...? 60
So many negative spiritual conversions may well have occurred
because of Marquez subversive incentives to mockery and apostasy,
and to final despair, the corrosion of hopelessness.
Yes, such artists want to create a new world, and these specially
initiated elites expect to find the dawn of a new Gnosis.61 In the
words of Mircea Eliade, this orientation constitutes in art the
absolute triumph of the permanent revolution ... all innovation [e.g.,
provocation and excess] is declared beforehand, by decree, to
be ... brilliant.62
Ibid., pp. 74-75 my emphasis added. Boixados quotes Germain Bazin,
Carmelite Studies (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1948), p. 515.
59
60
Ibid., p. 47.
61
Ibid., p. 57.
62
125
CONCLUSION
By understanding the three main elements of the drive the passion
and the fever to undo 1492, Catholics will have a much more
differentiated awareness of the larger, grand-strategic psychocultural warfare in which they are involved, whether they yet know
it or not.
There seems even to be a convergence of these various antiCatholic movements, which combine to produce an updated
Revolutionary Faith along with its Neo-Messianic Fever.
On the premise that contrast clarifies the mind, Catholics require
deeper strategic studies of these false religions and armed
ideologies and their delusional dialectics of liberation.
Premature wrong action is not the prudent or truly strategic
way to resist the often combined strategic initiatives of those who
would undo 1492.
The subversive new myth
Talmudic and Kabbalistic (Gnostic) Judaism is not the pre-Christian
Judaism of the Biblical Israelites. It is a new religion and armed
ideology and revolutionary faith rooted in the rejection of Christ
and the mockery of the Humility of God in the Incarnation.
Therefore, the current use of the phrase, the Judaeo-Christian
tradition, is itself subversive, as well as deliberately equivocal and
ambiguous. It is a subversive new myth.
The cruel embodiment of false religion
The Mohammedan religion, claiming to correct the distortions of
both the Judaic and the Christian revelations, and then to bring
forth the fulfillment of Gods revelation, is in truth, a very militaristic
and sensualist, materialist, cruel embodiment of a false religion,
which is, however, clearly on the rise in a worldwide insurgency
to advance the Sword of the Prophet.
126