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Despite its existence, the “psychological front” has another meaning in current tensions.

Paris could be looking to improve its defense capacity in the midst of a tense world, but the action could also be aimed at mitigating the effects of the serious domestic crisis.

China pushes for negotiations as Philippines deepens military ties with the US.

The small northeastern African nation of Eritrea lies on the Red Sea just north of Ethiopia. It is a nation of six million, with a growing overseas community in the United States and Europe, though most Westerners could not locate it on a map. Many Americans may be more familiar with other nations in the Horn of Africa, like the terrorist attacks of Al-Shabaab in Somalia, or the brutal civil war in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, Eritrea experiences its own set of crises, especially within the context of religious liberty.

Under its current constitution, the Eritrean government officially recognizes four religions: the Eritrean Tewahdo Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, Sunni Islam and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Eritrea. While Eritrea is a religiously pluralistic country, it has been governed only by the Party of People’s Front for Democracy and Justice since its independence from Ethiopia and remains the exclusive legal political party in the country. The US Department of State has re-designated Eritrea as a “country of particular concern” in 2022 for its violations of religious liberty. This list also includes North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Cuba.

Inclusion on this list entails sanctions on its export and import of defense equipment, which still apply to the present. All religious groups in the country require official registration with the administration of President Isaias Afwerki, which has hampered the abilities of churches to run independent schools and hospitals in Eritrea. While most of the dozen nations on this list hold notoriety in the American public consciousness, Eritrea has often been ignored. 

The Eritrean Orthodox Church is one of the largest religious groups in the country and one of six independent Oriental Orthodox Churches, along with the Ethiopian and Coptic Orthodox Churches. Upon Eritrean political independence from Ethiopia, the Eritrean Orthodox Church gained autocephaly (self-rule) from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in 1993, and finalized a formal agreement with Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church in 1994 to consecrate new bishops for the Eritrean Church. The first two patriarchs, Abune Phillipos and Abune Yacob, reigned in relative harmony with the Eritrean government and the Oriental Orthodox Communion. The third Patriarch, Abune Antonios, was removed from his position in 2006 only two years into his reign. Despite government pressure, Abune Antonios refused to excommunicate three thousand members of the Medhane Alem movement, which runs Bible studies among Eritrean Orthodox Christians. Abune Antonios criticized the arrest of three Orthodox priests who held a Bible study without government approval. Fifteen women in the city of Keren were also arrested for membership in Medhane Alem. Authorities would only release them after signing paperwork renouncing their membership thereof.

The layman Yoftahe Dimetros deposed Abune Antonios, taking his patriarchal garments and placing him under house arrest in the capital, Asmara. He was appointed as General Secretary of the Holy Synod with government support. Dimetros then appointed Bishop Dioscoros as the fourth patriarch. Throughout the entire reign of Dioscoros as Patriarch of Eritrea (who died in 2015), Abune Antonios maintained that his removal from his office violated Eritrean canon law. In 2019, the Holy Synod of the Eritrean Orthodox Church even excommunicated Abune Antonios for heresy. From 2019 Abune Antonios lived under house arrest on church property until his death on February 9, 2022. Only after the death of Abune Antonios did the Coptic Orthodox Pope (now Pope Tawadros II) decide to recognize the fifth Patriarch of Eritrea, Abune Kerlos, on July 7 2022 in order to reintegrate the Eritrean Orthodox Church within the Oriental Orthodox Communion, now that the Church has only one undisputed head. Abune Kerlos had been elected over a year earlier by the Holy Synod, on May 12 2021 and consecrated a bishop on June 13. Abune Kerlos died on December 2, 2022, just shy of five months of rapprochement with the Coptic Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria. 

Despite Eritrea’s unfortunate nickname as “the North Korea of Africa”, a better comparison can be struck between Eritrea and the People’s Republic of China, another country of particular concern on the 2022 countries of particular concern list. While China does not have a universal recognition of freedom of religion, it does offer constitutional protections for five religions: Daoism, Confucianism, Protestantism, Catholicism and Islam. Both countries harbor active repressions of religious minorities not included in this list. This includes the jailing of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Eritrea who will not serve in the military or the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China. For totalitarian regimes, like the Chinese Communist Party, the national interests centered around an explicitly atheist ideology trump any considerations of personal religious conscience. Even government recognition does not spare religious communities whom the CCP views as subversive.

Recognition is not intended as a protection for those communities, but rather a means for states to control and monitor their citizens. In 2018, the Chinese government pressured the Vatican to sign an agreement to allow for the merger of the Chinese underground Church into the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA). The CPCA does not hold to Catholic canon law– similar to the case of Abune Antonios- by appointing bishops without Vatican approval who are loyal to the communist party (although Pope Francis did allow for conscientious objectors to remain part of the underground Church despite the merger). Still, this introduces a crisis of spiritual authority for Eritrean Orthodox and Chinese Catholics alike. 

The irony of the Eritrean Orthodox Church is that its independence was intended to safeguard the national ambitions of millions of patriotic Orthodox Christians, who won a bloody thirty-year long war of independence against Ethiopia. Just as Egypt had the Coptic Church, and the Ethiopians had the Ethiopian Church, the Eritreans wanted an Eritrean Church. The creation of a national church however invited government intervention, which believed it could dictate Church policy. 

The post Eritrean Clergy in Captivity appeared first on Providence.

Why did Hitler declare war on America four days after Pearl Harbor, plunging into a conflict with three great powers?

According to HITLER’S AMERICAN GAMBLE: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War, by Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, Hitler’s reasons were strategic and ideological. 

War with America was inevitable, Hitler assumed, so better to strike first, with hopes of winning the war before full American industrial and military might could deploy against Germany. As early as in 1928, in his unpublished second book, Hitler cited America as the long term threat to Germany that would inevitably have to be confronted.

And Hitler saw America as the ultimate main ideological enemy, even more than the Soviet Union.  FDR and his “plutocrats” were the lynchpin of international Jewry, he believed.  The Soviets, as subhuman Slavs, must be destroyed so Germany could spread eastward.  But American capitalism was Nazi Germany’s most dangerous enemy. The Anglo-Saxons, he thought, were racially kindred but were manipulated by Jewish financiers.   

Hitler even delayed his genocide of West European Jews, whom he saw as hostages to America’s choice for war.  Once Germany and America were at war, Western Jews would suffer the same destruction as Eastern Jews.  They were punished as the purported friends of the American Jews who supposedly drove America to war.

Sadly, there were anti-intervention and isolationist Americans who faulted America’s Jews as a major force pressuring America into war with Germany.   America First leader U.S. Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, while insisting he wasn’t anti-Semitic, slyly noted that pro-war anti-Nazi Hollywood films were produced by “four names, each that of one of the Jewish faith, each one foreign born.”  When Charles Lindbergh faulted American Jews for driving America towards war, Nye defended him, “As Lindbergh said, without being anti-Semitic those of the Jewish faith are contributing to the cause of intervention. Their interest is very natural. If I were one of them, I should feel as they do toward those who have persecuted my people. But I should try not to let my natural hatred blind me to the first and best interests of my own country.”

And, even after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationists like Nye still adamantly opposed war on Germany. On December 7, 1941, Nye addressing an America First anti-war rally when, right before his speech, he was informed that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.  He stammered: “I can’t somehow believe this…” And then he delivered his speech as though nothing had happened. 

After Pearl Harbor, and until Hitler’s war declaration four days later, America First congressmen like Nye and U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson of California voted for war with Japan but continued to mobilize against any U.S. war in Europe.  Only Hitler himself was able to end the America First movement that had so fiercely opposed any U.S. efforts against the Axis powers.   

Hitler’s war declaration speech insisted that FDR “was strengthened in this resolve by the Jews around him. Their Old Testament thirst for revenge thought to see in the U.S.A. an instrument for preparing a second ‘Purim’ for the European nations which were becoming increasingly anti-Semitic. The full diabolical meanness of Jewry rallied round this man, and he stretched out his hands.”  He further explained “that the Anglo-Saxon-Jewish-Capitalist World finds itself now in one and the same front with Bolshevism does not surprise us National Socialists: we have always found them in company.”

Of FDR, Hitler further bemoaned: “First he incites war then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack-in the approved manner of an old Freemason.”  And, playing the victim, he decried: “The American President and his plutocratic clique have mocked us as the have-nots-that is true, but the have-nots will see to it that they are not robbed of the little they have.”

But FDR, Hitler explained, was not the first American president inspired by Jews to attack Germany.  “It is a fact that the two conflicts between Germany and the U.S.A. were inspired by the same force and caused by two men in the U.S.A. – Wilson and Roosevelt,” Hitler said, with the “force” being Jewry.  “We know today that a group of interested financiers stood behind Wilson and made use of this paralytic professor because they hoped for increased business. The German people have had to pay for having believed this man with the collapse of their political and economic existence.” 

Hitler asked, “Why is there now another President of the U.S.A. who regards it as his only task to intensify anti-German feeling to the pitch of war?” He noted that he and FDR had come to power in the same year, FDR from privilege and wealth, and he from poverty.  “When Roosevelt finally stepped on the political stage with all the advantages of his class, I was unknown and fought for the resurrection of my people. When Roosevelt took his place at the head of the U.S.A., he was the candidate of a Capitalist Party which made use of him: when I became Chancellor of the German Reich, I was the Führer of the popular movement I had created. The powers behind Roosevelt were those powers I had fought at home. The Brain Trust [FDR’s advisors] was composed of people such as we have fought against in Germany as parasites and removed from public life.”

Gleefully, Hitler contrasted his own success as ruler in reviving Germany with FDR’s New Deal, which was “actually the biggest failure ever experienced by one man.”  So, FDR stoked war fever and hatred towards Germany to divert public opinion.  But this diversion would not work. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, German radio announced that Europe was united against “Roosevelt’s Jewish-controlled robber barons.”

For Hitler, the war with America was an expansion of his own war at home against the Jews.  He never abandoned this theme. On his last “Political Testament,” written in his bunker shortly before committing suicide, he noted the war was “provoked solely by those international statesman who were either of Jewish origin or who worked for Jewish interests,” with FDR clearly in mind.  He made no mention of communism or the Soviets, who were above the bunker, overrunning Berlin.

Hitler of course was justified in hating America. It embodied or aspired to all that he opposed:  democracy, capitalism, free speech, human dignity for all.  And although America was not controlled by his imagined conspiracy of Jewish financiers, it is built on ultimately Jewish concepts about each person created equally by God. 

America in this sense is a Judaic nation whose principles trace to the Hebrew scriptures. For this reason, America will always be despised and feared by dictators and despotisms who want to displace God with their own revelation.  Hitler’s “American Gamble” failed. May all the others fail as well.      

The post Gambling Against America appeared first on Providence.

As South Africa chairs the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa grouping, and prepares to host the next annual summit scheduled for August this year, The bloc recently eclipsed the G7 group of developed countries in share of real global GDP

China completed its first purchase of liquefied natural gas (LNG) using cross-border yuan settlement. It comes amid rising acceptance of the yuan in the international market

Ever since the meeting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his/her Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, foreign policy experts sitting in India have started interpreting it in different ways

Erdoğan blasts US Ambassador for meeting with opposition leader Kılıçdaroğlu.

According to Western mainstream media, the Atlantic military alliance tries to control Kiev’s anger by giving it more money.