Living by the Sword

We are expected to live by the Word, not the sword, and I have been struggling with my past. It is said that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Hmmmm. We will all die anyway and it is one way to go and perhaps quite quick. Not that I would look forward to it, although most Knights in my day had an expectation that it would not be in their sleep or at the claws of a dragon. To die with a sword in the hand was an honourable way to go. As long as one was, indeed, honourable.

I keep my old sword under the bar top, out of sight but within easy reach. Wisdom, history and experience leaves us in no doubt that we live in difficult times, surrounded by many who would do us harm. From time to time we seem compelled to resist that harm by showing the sword, and even using it.  Whilst I may be a man of peace and clean tables, there are those outside of the Tavern's hedges that would have my head on a fence post in a jiffy, given half a chance.

But we try to minimise 'occasions of sin' by avoiding the wicked rather than inviting them to live in our homes. And if we are to teach the Word to those who have refused to hear, it is best done through a megaphone at a distance. But those inclined to wickedness will nevertheless attempt to infiltrate and invade, and even if we are willing to give our lives for our brother (and sister and mum and dad and the kids) it is best done by doing all we can to protect them with a sword in the first place.

The material world gives substance to an age-old, immaterial, supernatural battle, and I go by the belief that one such expression of Evil - the Main one of this era - is Islam, invented by Satan as a direct response to the Resurrection of Christ. It is the army of wickedness that has tried before to destroy Christianity and those countries that bend a knee in Love not 'submission'. 

The Scimitar is their sword. And the 'Good' must raise the Cross against it, and the sword if needed. But the western world, currently being invaded needs leadership for that and it seems that such leadership is starting to be seen, in Europe, the scene of previous invasions. As we heard from Mike Chapman.

Bavaria Places Christian Crosses in State Buildings to Reflect 'Christian Values'

The government of Bavaria has ordered that Christian crosses be placed in the entrances of all its public buildings, a rule that goes into effect on June 1, reported BBC News. 

 https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/bavaria-places-christian-crosses-state-buildings-reflect-christian-values

Markus Soder, the minister president of Bavaria and member of the Christian Social Union political party, said the crosses are not to be viewed as state-sanctioned religious symbols but as a 

"clear avowal of our Bavarian identity and Christian values." 

Crosses already are compulsory in Bavaria's public school classrooms and in courtrooms. 

Bavaria is located in the southeast corner of Germany and its largest city is Munich. 

This is good news indeed, especially considering the recent lunacy exhibited by Germany's Chancellor Merkle inviting the islamic hordes into the house. And to think that some people still hold a view that if only women were in charge it would be all sweetness and light. Hmmmm. A Green light to evil and decay in this instance.

"The cross is a fundamental symbol of our Bavarian identity and way of life," said President Soder in a statement, as reported by the BBC. "It stands for elemental values such as charity, human dignity and tolerance."

Jan Korte, the head of a left-wing group in the federal parliament, according to the BBC, said, "Why can the CSU never think of anything that brings people together, instead of trying to divide the country at every level." 

A real Mandy Rice Davies call. For a millenia and some it was Christianity that brought people together. It is the left that divides, and then blames division on the good and the just. Islam simply kills anyone not Islamic, and even some that are.

America in particular has been struck hard with demands by faux-offended snowflakes to take down crosses even from Catholic establishments. They do not want to offend muslims. Or atheists. Heck... I am offended by their demands. 

Many American politicians, Mayors, University Deans and even religious clergy, have shown spines of jellyfish. 

Instead of telling muslims to shove their demands, and that of the left, they have let them ravage the iconography that has sustained the nation.

Islamists destroy; churches, statues, people.

Leftists encourage it.

Bavaria's population is a little more than 12.6 million and about 52% of Bavarians are Catholic. About 20% of Bavarians are Protestant, 4% Muslim, and less than 1% Jewish. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) was born in Bavaria. 

Regional Bavaria cannot by itself, being part of Germany, stop the tide sucked in by Mrs Merkle.  It can only reinforce its Values. Hoist the Cross. 

Another European State, Hungary, is doing its best to keep the hordes outside the hedges, and is demanding that the EU compensates it for the cost. It is a brave state that crosses swords with the unelected Kommisars of the EU, so more power to their elbows I say.

Europe is the main region under threat from Islam and its hordes. The rest of the western world is feeling the heat of lax policies as more and more Muslims enter nations as 'refugees' bringing with them their hatred of infidels and desire / satanic orders to kill and destroy. Western politicians continue to be deliberately blind to what is happening. That is because the invasion is not how we have come to conceive of as to be invasion. But such happened before.

It was repulsed, at enormous cost. Brad Miner reminded us.

Living by the Sword

(Sixteen) years after the attacks of September 11, it’s probably the case that the “excuse” of the Crusades as a motivating factor behind the violence of al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups has somewhat diminished in plausibility.

Of course, the Islamofascists may well aver that events of more than 900 years ago still burn in Muslim consciousness, but that doesn’t make it so. 

 https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/10/02/living-by-the-sword/

Osama bin Laden made reference to the Crusades as, no doubt, has Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS. But the truth is they abhor the West because their understanding of Islam demands hatred of and war against the infidel: then, now, always. This is the only “root cause” that matters.

In any case, most of us will never have occasion to debate a terrorist on the matter. Indeed, we’re much more likely to go toe-to-toe with a jihadi liberal about the Crusades and their impact, which is what makes Thomas F. Madden’s new primer invaluable.

The Crusades Controversy: Setting the Record Straight is a 50-page broadside against the serial stupidities and half-truths of those who believe, in Professor Madden’s words, that the Crusades were “the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general.”

In fact, they were “a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslim armies had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world.” 

The armies that marched and sailed from Western Europe into the Byzantine Empire and on to the Holy Land came in response to pleas from Christians in the East to ......

save them from the weaponized religion of Mohammed.

Those Christian warriors summoned by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095 were not a rabble of “lacklands and ne’er-do-wells” spoiling for a fight wherever they could find one. They were a cross-section of European society that included many of the wealthiest, most powerful men in Europe, not a few of whom lost fortunes – and their lives – in the struggle to liberate the original homeland of Christianity, which had been established not by the sword, but through peaceful conversions half a millennium before the birth of Islam.

Pope Innocent III, successor to Urban II, asked the crusaders:

How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them?

Jerusalem had fallen to Islam more than 400 years before the crusaders liberated the holy city in 1099. But as Innocent suggests, the reconquest was only partly about restoring Christians to power in the heartland of the faith. The crusaders’ journey and the battles they fought were also a promised liberation from the burden of sin: an indulgence through which they might reach heaven.

Madden writes:

Crusaders were sinners. They undertook the Crusade not only to defend their world, but to atone for their sins. 

By the nature of their profession, warriors put their souls at risk. 

The Crusade was a means for them to save their souls.

Herein lies the struggle for all those men who take up the profession of arms. I know of many. 

Not all are 'good' in the sense of being lily-white. All mankind is flawed and prone to sin. It takes effort to be a Pure Knight. 

And Prayer. 

In any event, the triumph in Jerusalem, which electrified Europe, was short-lived. By 1291, Acre – the last Christian stronghold in the Middle East – had fallen, and what we call “crusades” in the centuries that followed became defensive, the last battle of which occurred at the Siege of Vienna in 1529.

Few seem to be taught the facts of history anymore. For the moment forget about the menz oppression of the poor ladies, the nasty white folk oppressing poor 'people of colour', the poor LGBTIQzyx's of the dark ages, just look at the battles. 

But the Crusades ended not because a “final battle” against Islam had been won (there would be another Battle of Vienna in 1683), but because the rise of nation-states, corruption in the Church, and the coming of Protestantism had weakened the will to continue crusading.

And what an ongoing effect  that has had. 

Within Europe new ideas were brewing. . . .Born out of a unique blend of faith, reason, individualism, and entrepreneurialism, those ideas produced a rapid increase in scientific experimentation with immediately practical applications. By the seventeenth century European wealth and power was growing exponentially. Europeans were entering a new and unprecedented age.

In the Islamic world, of course, this sort of progress stalled.

Pretty much since the 18th century, the reputation of the Crusades has followed a kind of rollercoaster path, although with more falls than rises. 

Perhaps the lowest point came when Bill Clinton said, in a speech after 9/11, that at that 1099 liberation of Jerusalem Jews were burned alive in a synagogue and Muslim men, women, and children were slaughtered on the Temple Mount – the crusaders knee deep in blood.

All lies.

But then, what do we expect when the Prince of Lies is so active that he even changes sex and expects us to follow suit. Or dress. Bill Clinton is so corrupt it is showing on his face.

What’s more, Muslims were largely not conversant with the reality of the Crusades until after WWI. 

The first Arabic-language history of the Crusades appeared in 1899, making Muslims’ “long memory” of the Crusades about as long as their memory of jazz. 

Everything from 1099 through Saladin and the several Battles of Vienna came to modern Muslims principally through 20th-century European colonial histories.

It is this colonial imperialism that contemporary Muslims have reacted to so violently. To wit: “This became particularly pronounced after the creation of the state of Israel, which Arabs contended was a new crusader kingdom. The fact that Israel was Jewish was irrelevant.”

In the end:

It is not the Crusades that led to the attacks of September 11, but an artificial memory of the Crusades constructed by modern colonial powers and passed down by Arab nationalists and Islamists. 

This new memory strips the medieval expeditions of every aspect of their age, dressing them up instead in the tattered rags of nineteenth-century imperialism.

Another way of saying this is that the Enlightenment, spawning the modern Left, is the source of modern Islamist rage about the Crusades. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are acting out a Western, anti-Christian fantasy that’s not even of their own making.

Of course, there are other spurs to Islamist attacks. 

Bringing the whole world into submission is a pretty big one.

Today we have more 'Good Men' than at any time in History, but only by virtue of population growth. It is a sad fact that little has changed since there were very few - most do nothing.

 And you all know how the old saying goes.

The Bavarian Minister has stood up and done something.

Your turn.

If you are going to be mown down by some Islamic nutter in the street, at least do not be sitting down in a wicker chair like the chap in the photo above. Stand and face the bastard. The Islamist is motivated by sheer Evil. You must be motivated to fight him.

So Fight. Even to what seems to be the end.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1790669/incredible-moment-isis-hostage-awaiting-execution-headbutts-fanatic-before-gunning-down-captors-and-escaping/

Tell him you Forgive him - if neccesary over his corpse. And hope that Christ will do Justice to both of you.

Right now have a drink. It may give you courage.

Then get a sword. 

Sell your coat if you have to.

Pax