In his Galatian epistle, the Apostle Paul had some harsh things to say about those who, he thought, were distorting the Gospel and endangering the emerging Christian faith. He knew that his words might not go down like honey: “Am I become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?” (4:16). In the United States today, much of the nation is in a frenzy, either of apprehension and terror of what unclearly known enemies could do, or of anger and determination to wreak destruction on those known or suspected of planning evil against us and our land.

Those of us, whether on the right or on the left, who ask questions, talk about just war and casus belli, or simply try to get the truth are seen suddenly not as patriots, but enemies.

Those on that other side are subject to denunciation and excoriation, from the sophisticated pages of The Weekly Standard to the strident voices of callers on conservative talk shows. Nevertheless, protesters do assemble, in rather pathetic numbers, calling for abstinence from war and the perpetuation of peace. On the scale of the “social register,” they are an elegant lot, from the “best” schools, the most sensitive, intellectually, and politically correct circles, from among those who protest global warming, ecological wastage, cigarette smoking in New York and Florida taverns, but who whole heartedly support the right to choose, i.e., to choose to kill the unwanted unborn.1

Among the conservatives, the “patriots,” the radio waves heavily laden with the signals of nationally syndicated and local talk shows, are filled with outbursts of rage and expressions of a fierce determination to use our much-vaunted and apparently unrivaled ability to kill and destroy from afar. We presume our own invulnerability as we threaten to demolish those from whom we fear a sneak attack. There are frenzied cries, “We must protect ourselves, we must have security!” (a reliably unavailable commodity in our tormented world, even for those of us who live in America the Beautiful). Observers on the watch for “hate” as an aggravating factor in deeds of violence, as well as of Speechcrime2 and Thoughtcrime, can find many examples on the air, but for the moment sentiments of this type have not yet been labeled hate.3

It is difficult to rage without an enemy against which to rage, and therefore one must be identified and denounced in increasingly strong terms. As the hymn says, “The world is very evil/ The days are growing late.” If we are brewing up a pot of verbal venom, we must have a target against which to launch it, or it will begin to poison us. Wonderfully, we have found one, a small tyrant once our ally, then guilty of plundering a smaller client state of ours, almost a vision of evil incarnate. Now he is known to the world as Saddam Hussein, president (dictator) of Iraq, that interesting little country, successor of Babylon and Assyria, created by Great Britain out of the residue of the Ottoman Empire, defeated in the Great War of 1914-1918. Just as it is difficult to love those we do not know, it is hard to hate without an evil adversary, and we have found ours. What we may be losing in the process is first, truth, then sanity, and in the extreme case, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

All “just war” doctrines, from Aristotle through Cicero, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Grotius to thinkers of our own era, such as Michael Walzer and the late Paul Ramsey, have seen national defense as the fundamental requirement for a war to be just: defense against attack or, in the limiting case, preemptive action against an immediate threat. But tempora mutantur, the times they are a changin’, and we are moving fast to change with them: “New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth.” As in Orwell’s vision of dystopia, war becomes peace and ignorance is truth. Will attacking and invading Iraq prove to be a “piece of cake” unlike Vietnam, or are surprises waiting? War seldom goes entirely as planned.

As the United States gird for war, our strategists are planning (in earlier days one might have said “plotting”) what by normal standards of ordinary English would be aggressive war against a nation which has not attacked us, but which of course might do so, in total disregard for its own safety and its continuing existence on the surface of the planet. In the 1930’s, it was plotting aggressive war that led to the accusations at the International War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg and in Japan, where nations that have never waged aggressive war (or not often) gathered to try the leaders of two nations who did so, mistakenly underestimating the strength of their adversaries. Today, however, things are different. A three-letter word, war, is the key to the difference. We are not plotting war; we are already at war, and we must respond to it, if only we knew precisely who and how.

“We are at war!” Ordinarily, war is a matter between sovereign states, or in the case of civil war, between rival factions within a state. But there was no identifiably responsible state on September 11, 2001, when President Bush uttered those momentous words. A war on terrorism. Terrorism has no national home. “Isms” have no foreign ministries, prepared to receive declarations of war or sign peace treaties. Therefore we must have a target against which or against whom to focus, and one has been supplied, by his own evil schemes and by our analysis. His name, “Saddam,” is attaining a celebrity rivaling that of old Adolf.

The arguments of both the pacifists and the “patriots” share something with those of the calmer “experts” who look down on the struggles of Messrs. Bush, Arafat, Sharon, and Hussein from some academic, ecclesiastical, journalistic, or political Olympus: to put it in simple language, they really do not know what they are talking about.

We trust that our high authorities have a much more thorough grasp of the facts than what they share with us. The information with which we are provided by our authorities, resounding endlessly through all of the media, is selective, incomplete, flawed, and sometimes mendacious. We are experiencing a far more ominous development than what we thought, said, heard, and did in Yugoslavia, where it is apparent that we launched our bombers and cruise missiles on the basis of a seriously flawed understanding of the scene on the ground. Specifically, in the aftermath of Mr. Clinton’s War, it has now become evident that much of that which we were told by government spokesmen, American and British, was mistaken, contrived, or false. This includes the incident that became for Mrs. Albright, and some say for Mrs. Clinton also, the casus belli, the massacre of innocent Albanian citizens at Racak in January 1998. We now know, reported in journals such as The Independent (British), Figaro (French), La Reppublica (Italian), and finally in our own sober Wall Street Journal, that it was not a massacre, but a tableau prepared by Kosovar “freedom fighters” in the aftermath of a little battle with Yugoslav forces. The goal was to enrage the United States and NATO and lead to attacks on Yugoslavia; it was achieved.

The behavior of the United States and our various NATO allies (vassals, the French said) brought great destruction on a small country with which we were at peace, which had done nothing to us or to any of the European powers that so gaily attacked it, and which continues to bleed from multiple wounds. We succeeded in violating our own declared “war aims,” which included preserving Yugoslav/ Serbian sovereignty and establishing the second new Islamic state on old Christian soil. Perhaps an intended by-product of this unique “campaign” should have been renewed affection and sympathy on the part of the Muslims for our nation and our policies. That may have happened for a moment, but if that was the expectation, it was certainly vain, as the terrorist attacks of September 11, and especially the reactions all over the world of Islam, show. Around the United States and the United Kingdom, the attitude seems to be, “Who cares? We went to war, and we won. Case closed.”

As readers of this Report know, and indeed anyone and everyone who keeps ears and eyes open and listens to President Bush, his cabinet, his advisers, and most of the sages of the world of learning, we are repeatedly told that Islam is a religion of peace, one that has been “hijacked” by terrorist extremists. It is surely not in our interest to goad Muslims into violent hostility by continually reproaching them with their history of conquests or record of religious and ethnic strife today. Nevertheless, the “religion of peace” is a vision of what we would like Islam to be, rather than of Muslim reality in history and today. Precisely why it is Islam that has produced the terrorist extremists is never discussed. We tell ourselves that Islam is peaceful, and many of us apparently believe it. That is the reason that the focus of our outrage, the potential target of our bombs and invading troops, must not be Islam, but a selected scapegoat, in this case, Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq.4

What is behind this apparent attempt at self-deception and misinformation? Are we trying to convince ourselves or change the Muslims? Do we think that by telling ourselves that Muslims are by nature and conviction peaceful (ignoring fourteen hundred years of history) that we make them so, or at least tempt them in that direction? It makes more sense to see a potential rival (or enemy) as he is, and to seek to stand up to him honorably, than to try to persuade him to act as though he did not have the convictions and the history that have characterized him up to the present. Two strong opponents can look upon one another with a measure of respect and admiration, as the Muslim Saladin and the Christian Richard the Lion-Hearted once did. It is more than doubtful that that respect would have been increased if Richard had likened Saladin to a bunny or Saladin likened Richard to a little lamb.

Taking comfort in our illusions is a dangerous policy, like that of telling oneself in 1938 that Hitler would be satisfied with the Sudetenland alone. In this, as in many other aspects of American foreign and domestic policy, truth is rare and hard to find. However, if we cannot discern truth and learn how to respond to it, disaster beckons, because truth tells us what is there in the real world, not in the dream worlds of entertainment and reality shows.

From the days of Socrates, and no doubt long before, dialogue — two persons speaking with one another — has been a tool by which to find truth. This is as it should be. Behind the idea that one can find truth through dialogue is the presupposition or conviction that truth exists, that it is not a moving target that will constantly elude finding.

In our own day, truth is in short supply. The major media have particularly effective ways of keeping it out of sight. The electronic media, which are the major source of news for much of the population, present something that seems like reality, but is in effect only a warm bath in electronic stimuli. There is a difference between actually going to a Catholic Mass, participating, and taking communion on the one hand, and watching the most eminent archbishop, even the Pope himself, bowing over the bread and wine to be consecrated, with his hands filling the screen, on the other. In fact, the television techniques which permit the viewer to see the gnarled hands of the old pontiff holding the consecrated host is doubly deceptive, because it gives the impression that what is important is what is being viewed, whereas the theology of the Mass is dominated by the words of Jesus, “This do,” not “Watch this” (Luke 22:19).

There is a difference between playing football, even a sandlot game, and watching it on television; indeed, there is even a difference between attending a basketball game in person and watching one with its endless instant replays on the screen. A missed basket? Missed another one? Or was that just the first of a series of instant replays? Football players on the line of scrimmage will not normally see the facial expressions of the center or the quarterback, but such fill the television screen. Things that even the players themselves cannot see on the court fill the screen and continue to give that false impression of reality. A far worse development of this unreality is the representations of violence on the screen, for watching costs nothing and does not hurt, but real violence can cost everything.

The print media offer unreality in a different way, largely as a matter of selection and exclusion. The reader, unlike the viewer, must engage his mind and use his imagination to process the reports that he reads. By presenting endless, often irrelevant details on one topic and slighting or totally ignoring others, the media focus the attention of their readers where they think that it should be. Rather, as Jacques Ellul pointed out in Propaganda, what the media does not want to have happen has not happened.

The treatment in print of the sad fate of the space shuttle Columbia illustrates this also. Local papers — such as the ones your editor reads — have been filled for days with little but reports of the incident, its aftermath, its potential causes, the possibility of saving the crew, etc. President Bush eulogized the victims with the words, “They go in peace for all mankind.” De mortuis nil nisi bonum, speak nothing but good of the dead, and Mr. Bush has honored the slogan and the dead. But the actual words: “in peace”? and “for all mankind”? At some point in our descent into a dream world we must stop repeating fancies and seek to tell the truth.

The President’s words of praise and consolation offered comfort to the bereaved and will be recalled later by orphaned children too young to understand them today. Nevertheless, we must put this in perspective. The personnel of the second lost space shuttle represents a very tiny portion of those men and women who have given their lives for others or in the fulfillment of duty. The financial loss is great, but that, of course, was not the President’s concern. The space program will wobble for a moment, but will not be curtailed or destroyed. Some benefit will come as NASA seeks to discover the reasons for the disaster, and it may be long before another one like it occurs. The losses on the downed shuttles, the Oklahoma City federal building, or even in the World Trade Center, dreadful though they were for those affected, are not on the scale of any actual war of history. To make momentous historical events out of them is another way of deceiving ourselves about reality.

Why then the immense preoccupation? The Columbia crashed only a few days after the Superbowl, that spectacular football encounter which supposedly was seen on television by more people around the world than any other event.

Now the Columbia, the mourning, the eulogies, the self-criticisms, and the efforts to imagine how it could have been avoided have filled the pages of the press. But what has been left out? Readers must know that war may well be brewing, with an instant casualty rate far exceeding the seven dead on Columbia. Such a war, unlike the shuttle disaster, will not be an accident; it will be the result of deliberate planning. The space shuttle crash was a dreadful blow, but it was not a moral issue, unless it could be shown that there was carelessness and disregard of duty. War, like so many other decisions that are so glibly made, is a moral decision, and those who determine to wage it will have to stand at the bar of history and the judgment of God.

In the period of history from which we are said to have emerged, “modernity” or “modern times,” the quest for truth took precedence over revelation doctrines, traditions, and mores. “Truth, though the heavens fall!” Let us find the truth, whether it be biblical criticism, naturalistic evolution, or behavioristic determinism; whether they deprive us of what B. F. Skinner considered our illusions of freedom and dignity, whatever it may do. The days in which we presupposed both that truth exists and that it can to some extent be found were days that honored the dialogue from Socrates to the near present. The postmodern mind, in which we are all now supposed to have a part, has changed the concept of truth from something real, to be sought and discovered, to a convention: your truth, my truth, their truth. Dialogue gives place to dialectic, the never-ending interaction of thesis, which evokes its antithesis, leading to the blending into a synthesis. The synthesis is not itself the truth, but becomes the thesis for a new antithesis. Our current mentality substitutes the process for the goal. We are substituting dialectic for dialogue, with the result that truth will not come to light. There are different ways of stating this: form before substance, process rather than principle, or perhaps just “spin.”

In many areas of life, the interaction, thesis-antithesis-synthesis-new thesis, is acceptable, even good. This would include what we may call open questions, or in theological language, adiaphora, things neither commanded nor forbidden. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church thought and acted as though prayer to God, especially the Mass, should be in Latin. Yet nowhere was that required in the founding documents of Christianity; the Bible existed in Hebrew and in Greek, not Latin. When the universal dominance of Latin in the Mass ended after the Second Vatican Council, there was nostalgia, but nothing crucial changed.5 There can well be a dialectic on the language of worship without doing injury to the fundamental question of who is to be worshiped and why.

There are areas in life where dialogue is highly desirable, if it is dialogue in the Socratic sense and intended to arrive at truth that already exists, not to create a substitute reality. Often one can read in the religious press of a “dialogue” concerning things where one answer is true and correct and the opposite is false, perhaps evil. Should we not have a dialogue on “a woman’s right to choose”? Apart from the fact that the very language of choice is itself mendacious, deliberately concealing what it is that is to be chosen, namely, the right to dispose of (kill) unwanted offspring, provided it is done early enough, there really are not two equally appropriate answers to the question, “the right to choose.” Human beings have the ability to make choices of many different kinds, and in a sense they may be said to have a right to do so: Does one have the right to suicide, to kill oneself? We must distinguish between right in the sense of a just title and the simple power to do something.

Shall we not have a dialogue between “homo-” and “hetero-” sexuality? To what extent should we embrace both? Cannot those who are drawn to homosexual behavior and homosexual life rejoice in the orientation as a gift of God? Should there not be a study group, a commission? Can we not “reason together” as the late President Johnson liked to ask (Isaiah 1:18)? Indeed we can, provided we know where to find the authority, where to find truth. Reasoning together in the sense of the words of the Lord in Isaiah is not an effort to find a compromise position between what God requires and what man would like, but an effort to open our eyes so that we can see what God expects of us. If we consent and obey, we shall eat the best of the land, but if we refuse and rebel, we shall be devoured by the sword (Isaiah 1:19-20).

A dialogue on gay marriage? Such things have taken place in many church bodies. The presupposition is that there is no guidance from God on this subject. Perhaps God does not know, or does not care, or will say, “anything goes.”

Should we have a dialogue on capital punishment? If we mean a discussion of whether and to what extent capital punishment is effective, may be used, becomes cruel and unusual, then it may be quite appropriate. If, however, we intend to argue on whether what is reported in Scripture is applicable, then we are not engaged in a dialogue about capital punishment, but about God’s authority and the reliability of his recorded words: “You shall not pity him [the one who has committed premeditated murder], but you shall purge the blood of the innocent from Israel, that it may go well among you” (Deuteronomy 19:13; cf. vv. 11-21).

The call for dialogue, when it presupposes the existence of truth and represents a real effort to find and embrace it, is good. When it is a call for compromise between two positions, only one of which can be right, it is a very deceptive way of granting permission to think and do wrong. Dialogue in the sense of the quest of truth is excellent, dialogue in the sense of dialectic, to arrive at a synthesis in which no element is true and none is false, is a new and refined way to practice deception.

The ability to read — literacy — may render one susceptible to propaganda, but given anything like freedom of expression, expanding the ability to receive knowledge should expand the possibilities of thought, reflection, and intelligent decisions that should undergird a democratic social order. As we Americans discuss, debate, and perhaps engage in dialectic about whether, when, and how far to utilize our own wonder weapons, the French, no longer convinced that they have the right to act alone, are analyzing. In the midst of so many sad events that seem to be occurring around the world, historian Emmanuel Todd has drawn attention to a little-remarked development: the rise of literacy worldwide. It is by no means the product only of the free market, but, as he says, “a stage in the mental revolution that has finally extended to the entire planet.” The U.S.S.R., with all of the faults that characterized the “evil empire,” as President Reagan called it, succeeded in creating virtually total literacy throughout its entire extent, an unparalleled accomplishment and one that may bode well for the future of democracy, for people who cannot read may find it hard to know, and people who cannot know will find it hard to think, vote, and choose wisely. “If we take into account the principle of acceleration, we can say that for the younger generations, a universal planetary literacy will be on the horizon by 2030. As the invention of writing goes back to about 3000 B.C., it has taken mankind five thousand years fully to achieve the revolutionary developments tied to writing.”

In addition to many encouraging things, Emmanuel Todd offers a striking view of American power as we seek to assert ourselves in the Near East and around the world. In 1976, M. Todd wrote “The Final Fall” (La chute finale), announcing “the decomposition of the Soviet sphere,” which took place less than twenty years later. In 2002 he published “After the Empire. An Essay in the Decomposition of the American System” (Après l’empire. Paris: Gallimard), arguing that our efforts in Iraq and elsewhere are the convulsions of a system in distress, but that somehow things will turn out well in the world, because people everywhere are learning to read and to write and are beginning to control excessive fertility. M. Todd has interesting insights, and they have the charm of suggesting that the future is less bleak than we might otherwise think it likely to be.

During his State of the Union address, President Bush spoke of creating a culture of life and added an expression of determination to end partial birth abortion. Curiously, this behavior fulfilled a liberal critic’s prophecy that the President would utter a few words on that extremely gruesome and odious technique of terminating a baby to satisfy his evangelical base and then go on to other things.

In the context of his dynamic approach to questions of terrorism as well as the economy, it is puzzling to observe his caution (pusillanimity) on the issue of life and death before birth. He is called to defend the substance of the nation, and it is not the terrorists of today nor the Communists of yesterday who are gnawing away at our human substance, but our abortionists and abortion facilities, who continue to destroy approximately one-quarter of every new generation.

Conservatives, Republicans, and other friends of the President want to explain and excuse his reluctance to address this issue truthfully and forcefully by saying that he must make concessions in order not to compromise his leadership, especially with regard to the war on terrorism. The difficulty is that he is already compromising by compromising on something that should be a matter of principle, not open for debate and compromise, but for No or Yes.

It is evident to all that the President cannot, by a wave of his wand, change the abortion situation in the United States. As the Supreme Court observed in Casey a few years ago, people have gotten used to it, women rely on it. This is a wonderful example of stare decisis; one could argue as well that people, slaveholders at any rate, have gotten used to having slaves. What is most necessary is to attempt to change the hearts and minds of the people, so that they will realize what they are doing to themselves and the next generations (and not least what they are doing to Social Security and welfare benefits by reducing the pool of active workers).

A step in the right direction is, people say, “better than nothing.” It is not at all clear that it really is better than nothing, for to say that partial birth abortion is wrong without saying why, does nothing to make it clear to the people of the nation what is at stake and what they are losing by their ongoing acceptance of “choice.” It is rather as though, asked to oppose racism, one were to say, “Let’s ban lynching.” A step in the right direction? Hardly. Mr. Bush, you are our leader, and the nation is prepared to follow you, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, into the war that you think we must fight. If you are prepared to ask our armed forces to kill, and perhaps to die, in Iraq, can you not also tell our people what we are doing to ourselves in the United States? Can you not ask, “Whatever you may think about abortion, can it be good to kill a quarter of the next generation?”

A recent issue of Pat Buchanan’s new magazine, The American Conservative, reminds us of the strange disproportion of the news coverage of two atrocious crimes, first, the “hate crime” against Matthew Shepherd, who was beaten to death by three men after having propositioned them in a bar. It was covered in all of the major media — 45 articles in the New York Times and 28 in the Washington Post. Second, in 2000, a 13-year-old boy, Jesse Dirkhising, was systematically raped and tortured to death by two homosexual men, who had been his employers. Only one small article appeared in a major newspaper, to its credit the Washington Post. Again, this is an example of Jacques Ellul’s principle, “What the media do not wish to have happened has not happened.”

We have freedom of expression in the United States; the First Amendment protects naked dancing, flag burning, and the foulest speech and behavior in the public arena, as long as it does not seem to threaten immediate violence. Thus, no one prevents even the least politically correct from speaking out. The “soft censorship” is “prior censorship” attached, as it were, to their names, so that anything that they may say or write is immediately and instantly disregarded, left unnoticed, or perhaps dismissed with a sneer. The names of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and even Franklin Graham come to mind. The last of the three, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, has a commendable record of ministry to the poor, Samaritan’s Purse, but that does not protect him from disqualification when he utters his politically incorrect evaluation of Islam. The second way is simply by ignoring. The individuals named, and others equally worth hearing, are allowed to speak, to write, to publish, provided they can find a publisher or periodical to print their material. But no one notices outside of their own small circle of admirers.

Journals, newsmagazines, and media outlets with ties to intellectual and/or religious conservatism, such as National Review and Christianity Today, keep their own skirts clean by avoiding the use of writers who are odious to the general intellectual elite. This we may call the “place in the sun” aspect of intellectual conservatism. By bringing up only those critical ideas that are not too far removed from the correct center, the better class of conservative and neo-conservative media avoid being tarred with the brush of Falwell. What this does is limit intellectual, political, and religious discussion to only part of the legitimate spectrum. One of the casualties of this phenomenon is Professor Philip Johnson, the law professor who has put “Darwin on Trial.” The late apostle of evolution Stephen Jay Gould and his allies essentially refused to interact with Johnson, not refuting him but more or less reducing him to silence by consistently ignoring him. Prof. Johnson can speak at religious gatherings, such as those of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship on university campuses, but woe betide any university that might seek to give him a prominent public hearing under university auspices.

This soft censorship is less painful than that which prevails in dictatorial and totalitarian regimes, that is true. Unfortunately, it often goes unrecognized; after all, the Falwells and Grahams, the Carsons, Browns, Howards, and Rosenbergs of this world are allowed to speak, are they not? For a democratic political order to function rationally and effectively, it is necessary for the public to receive the information that it needs, and this is precisely what soft censorship prevents.

• In addition to the interesting news about the rise of literacy worldwide, we can observe the beginnings of a demographic shift almost everywhere in the world. The birth rate is declining almost everywhere, and in the long term it may decline in the Third World to the same level as in the West, in most of which it is well below replacement level. In the United States, there is one of the rare increases in the birth rate, which has risen from 1.8 per woman during her lifetime — not quite at replacement level — to 2.1 today. Exactly how this change has been accomplished is not yet specified. Perhaps a declining fertility of the older European stock is compensated by increased fertility among new immigrants. There also seems to be a trend toward fewer abortions and more young people claim to reject abortion. The concept of abstinence education is rising, despite frenzied opposition from Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups. These things are taking place in a media climate that has not changed. One development that does not seem to have changed is the placing of homosexual conduct and the homosexual life style on the same level that has been afforded to sexual normality.

• The Swedish government has passed a law making it an offense to criticize homosexuality publicly. By that standard, there are passages of Scripture that a pastor may not expound from the pulpit: for example Romans 1 and I Corinthians 6:10f. Similar legislation also exists in Canada, although we have not yet heard of any pastor being prosecuted. Sometimes it is sufficient, from the point of view of government, to inspire fear and reduce the clergy to silence. When George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-four in 1949, few people imagined that “speechcrime” could exist anywhere but in a totalitarian state such as Orwell envisaged. Speechcrime now exists in the United States as well, although so far without legal penalties. There are words that one may not use and ideas that one may not utter. In contrast to the words that one dare not say, there are others that have a devastating effect when hurled at an opponent, rendering all discussion superfluous and reducing him to silence or stammering apologies. “Racism” is one such word, “homophobia" another. “Judgmental,” by contrast, while damaging, is less devastating. Next on the list, we shall have thoughtcrime.

• Often under no compulsion from government, public school authorities are continuing their relentless war against religious, i.e. Christian, expression on the part of schoolchildren. Children who passed out little pieces of candy with Bible verses were disciplined by their school, not, of course, because of the Bible verses, but because their conduct was “disobedient.” In the present climate, if they had passed out pornographic pictures, they would probably have been protected by the usual suspects, such as the ACLU and People for the American Way.

Footnotes

1 With respect to killing, we face what Jean-Marc Berthoud calls a confusion of categories: many of the protesters have the greatest anguish about the killing of a convicted murderer (anguish arguably unwarranted) or about the killing of innocent civilians (surely warranted), but none at all about the regular “termination” of human lives at some point before birth.

2 Concepts developed by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-four, and increasingly to be found in the declarations of the New Patriots (war-minded), as well as in the language of those who favor abortion and abhor “homophobia.” In Orwell’s book, one of the obligatory exercises for citizens of Oceania was the “Two Minutes Hate,” in which everyone was worked up into a rage against the enemy of the moment.

3 Verbal attacks on Islam are an exception; these may often be stigmatized as based on hate, just as are criticisms of homosexual conduct.

4 Iraq is the Near Eastern Muslim country that treats Christians better than any other. There is a strange tendency of U.S. foreign policy to discriminate against those who are partial to the Christian faith.

5 This is said from a non-Catholic perspective. Many traditionalist Catholics think that something very important has been lost. Even so, they will acknowledge that the “dialectic” Latin vs. vernacular languages is far less likely to be destructive of fundamental truths than, for example, a dialogue on whether God is one or many.

Notes on Sources

For “Read and Talk,” see Emmanuel Todd, Après l’empire (Paris, Gallimard, 2002, pp. 38, 40); for “Soft Censorship,” see Thomas E. Woods, Jr., “The Politics of Atonement” in The American Conservative, Jan. 27, p. 26.