To give an idea of how widespread the decline is, here are the figures for a few countries. In the United States, the rate is 1.8; in Australia, 1.8; in China, 1.7, in Thailand, 1.5; in Iran, 2.1, and in Russia, 1.8. Only in Africa are there countries where birth rates are far above replacement level. The rate in Kenya is 3.3; in Nigeria, 5.1; and in Niger, an astonishing 6.6.

Demographers associate the decline in fertility in advanced economies with their “demographic transition”. As a country becomes more industrialised and richer and healthier, birth rates begin to fall. There are complex reasons for this, but basically people invest in quality rather than quantity. Because more children survive, parents can afford to have fewer of them and invest more in their education.

Social scientists began to notice this in the 19th century during the Industrial Revolution. The conventional wisdom was that the standard of living was the main driver of fertility decline.

However, recent research by a French economist at the University of Manchester challenges this. Religious commitments may also be important.

In an intriguing article in the Works in Progress site, Guillaume Blanc studies fertility in 17th and 18th century France. It was in France that Europe’s demographic transition began. The great French historian Fernand Braudel once asked:

“Did France cease to be a great power not, as is usually thought, on 15 June 1815 on the field of Waterloo, but well before that, during the reign of Louis XV when the natural birth-rate was interrupted?”

Blanc points out that around 1750, before the Industrial Revolution took off, France had a population of 25 million, compared to England’s 5.5 million. The two countries were at war almost continuously between 1793 to 1815. Allied to England were Austria, Prussia and Russia. But France had so many young men of fighting age that it was able to field an army of a million men.

Nowadays, France’s population is roughly the same size as Great Britain — 68 million compared to 56 million. But, “had France’s population increased at the same rate as England’s since 1760, there would be more than 250 million French citizens alive today,” Blanc points out. No wonder it is no longer a superpower.

What happened? Blanc points out that fertility rates began to stall in France in the 17th century and fell dramatically in the 18th century – before the Industrial Revolution. So the driver of French decline must have been culture, not a rising standard of living.

His explanation is startling – it was caused by a decline in the influence and prestige of the Catholic Church.

The Church encouraged large families. It always has. The Bible would never be selected as Planned Parenthood Book-of-the-Month. “Certainly sons are a gift from the Lord, the fruit of the womb, a reward,” says Psalm 127. “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man who has filled his quiver with them.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church observes that: “Sacred Scripture and the Church’s traditional practice see in large families a sign of God’s blessing and the parents’ generosity.”

Not everyone agrees, even in Catholic France in the 17th and 18th centuries. Primitive contraceptive methods were widely known and practised, even if they were condemned from pulpits. And if the Church lost its prestige, one would expect that more people would use contraception.

Blanc compared regional fertility rates in France with regional secularisation. He did this with the help of big data from millions of crowd-sourced family trees.

“Using this genealogical data, I estimate that the decline in fertility took hold in France in the 1760s, more than a century earlier than in any other country. The average number of children per woman declined from more than 4.5 to 3.5 in less than 40 years. In the meantime, the average English woman was bearing six children. … In England, the industrial revolution made people richer, but they spent their additional wealth having more children.”

Relying on research by other scholars, he mapped fertility rates against secularisation.

Whether it was dechristianization, secularization, or simply a loss of influence of the clergy is hard to say, but the data shows that attitudes toward life and death changed radically in the course of the eighteenth century.

At the end of the seventeenth century, most testators referred to God, Paradise, or various saints in their wills. On the eve of the French Revolution, they used more secular language and expressions, such as ‘indispensable tribute that we owe to Nature’, to discuss death. Other measures, such as requests for requiem masses (perpetual masses for the dead), bequests, offerings to the church, or even invocations of the Virgin Mary or average weight of funeral candles, all declined significantly.

And he reaches a startling conclusion:

According to the genealogical data, … the fertility transition only took place after dechristianization. I also find that the effect persisted for generations, as persons born in secular places passed their secular values on to their children, even after moving to places with different institutional and cultural norms. This means that dechristianization was not only institutional but rather, and above all, cultural.

As to what caused secularisation, Blanc does not venture a definitive answer. But he notes that the most secularised regions of France were those where the heresy of Jansenism was influential and where the Counter-Reformation was most active. Jansenism was a complex phenomenon which fostered a rigid, holier-than-thou spirituality and suspicion of Rome. Why the Counter-Reformation reforms were associated with secularisation is more puzzling, but perhaps people resented authoritarian clerics. “Secularization might have been a backlash against religious powers closely connected to absolutism,” Blanc conjectures.

The reason for the decline in fertility rates in Europe – and then the rest of the world – will probably always remain a mystery. But Blanc’s research is thought-provoking. If dechristianisation dragged fertility down, will rechistianisation raise it up? Will increasing fervour amongst faith-filled folks lead the way to a world of large families? To rescuing humanity from slow extinction?

What else will?

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The Economist, an oracle for politicians, journalists, and economists everywhere, has turned bearish on the future of humanity. The theme of its latest cover story is that world is running out of people.

Exhibit A in its sombre look at the future of the world economy is a seven-minute mockumentary produced by the Italian baby food manufacturer Plasmon. It’s called “Adamo 2050 | A true story from the future”. “Adam is a special child,” says the narrator. “He’s the last child born in Italy.” The camera pans across empty maternity wards and empty classrooms.

The film exaggerates – there will still be bambini in Italy’s playgrounds in 2050 – but the problem is real. One of the country’s leading demographers, Alessandro Rosina, says in the film that Italy, with a birth rate of 1.24 (2.1 is necessary to maintain the existing level of population), is the first country in the world where there are more grandparents than children.

The Economist’s leader (editorial) declares: “in much of the world the patter of tiny feet is being drowned out by the clatter of walking sticks. The prime examples of ageing countries are no longer just Japan and Italy but also include Brazil, Mexico and Thailand.”

The focus of The Economist’s concerns is, of course, the economy. Prosperity depends on productivity. If there are fewer people, those remaining will have to be more productive and creative. But old folks tend not to be creative.

Older countries—and, it turns out, their young people—are less enterprising and less comfortable taking risks. Elderly electorates ossify politics, too. Because the old benefit less than the young when economies grow, they have proved less keen on pro-growth policies, especially housebuilding. Creative destruction is likely to be rarer in ageing societies, suppressing productivity growth in ways that compound into an enormous missed opportunity.

So what is to be done? Dunno, says The Economist. Like nearly everyone else, its brainiacs are stumped. One by one, the leader ticks off solutions which are being proposed around the world:

Immigration? Nope. “The global nature of the fertility slump means that, by the middle of the century, the world is likely to face a dearth of young, educated workers unless something changes.”

Pro-family subsidies? Nope. “Singapore offers lavish grants, tax rebates and child-care subsidies—but has a fertility rate of 1.0.”

More and better education? Nope. There are short terms gains to be made by educating people in Africa, China and India. But “encouraging development is hard—and the sooner places get rich, the sooner they get old.”

ChatGPT? Aha! There’s an idea! The Economist wheels the latest fad, AI, out as its most promising nominee for a productivity revolution.

“An über-productive AI-infused economy might find it easy to support a greater number of retired people. Eventually AI may be able to generate ideas by itself, reducing the need for human intelligence. Combined with robotics, AI may also make caring for the elderly less labour-intensive. Such innovations will certainly be in high demand.”

Even to the brainiacs at The Economist, this must sound deluded. The leader limps along to its facile conclusion: “Fewer babies means less human genius. But that might be a problem human genius can fix.”

No, AI is not going to save Italy and the rest of the human race from extinction. Human genius will fail to motivate women to have babies. The only solution is a spiritual revival. Men and women need to rediscover the joy of bringing new life into the world and the confidence that they can work through the challenges of raising children. Short of that, nothing is going to work.

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We history buffs just love demography. Why? Because demography makes, shapes and orchestrates all that history. A sterling example is found in that lush South Pacific archipelago known as the Philippines.

So here goes.

On Easter Sunday, March 31, 1521, Captain Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet chaplain Father Pedro Valderrama celebrated the first Roman Catholic Mass in the Philippines. In just a few weeks, well over 2,000 natives were received into the Church. Today the Philippines is the only Christian country in East Asia.

But in Magellan’s time not everyone was on board to convert. Unfortunately, the good captain got embroiled in tribal politics, confronting the forces of the anti-conversion Lapulapu, chief of tiny Mactan Island. Magellan was killed in the ensuing battle.

Four decades later Miguel Lopez de Legazpi arrived from Mexico and established Spanish dominion that endured for over 300 years. The US seized it in the Spanish-American War. After a brutal Japanese occupation during World War II, the Philippines became independent in 1946.

The sovereign Philippines, heavily dependent on US aid, is a Pacific outpost of the American Empire. This vexes China, which is quite uptight about the spectre of maritime containment by Western-allied East Asian powers, namely Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines.

Ethnically, most Filipinos would qualify as “Pacific Islanders” under the rubric of the US Census. They are of mostly Austronesian stock, a group with roots in ancient Taiwan that migrated all over the place beginning about 3,500 years ago.

The Philippines has close to 200 distinct ethnolinguistic groups. Over time, people of Chinese, Spanish and other ancestries assimilated to an extent, yielding a unique though diverse Filipino identity. However, close to 10 percent of the population is Muslim, largely of Bengali origin, concentrated on the southern island of Mindanao. While Islam arrived way before Catholicism, over 80 percent of Filipinos are Catholic.

Nonetheless, the merciless menace of Modernity is upon them. I was not gobsmacked in the least to see the recent South China Morning Post headline: “As Asia grapples with declining birth rates, Catholic-majority Philippines wants fewer babies.”

The government claims that family planning is essential for “economic success.” This idea is nothing new. In 2014 Philippine academic Oliver M. Tuazon broke the news to MercatorNet readers:

The single, most divisive issue in contemporary Philippine history—the passage of the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012—had its sequel last week when the Supreme Court of the Philippines, following a number of challenges to the law, declared it “not unconstitutional”, save for eight items which it struck down.

The RH Law, as it is popularly known, took more than 13 years to pass through Congress, and was finally railroaded through by the newly elected President Benigno Aquino. It does not legalise contraceptives in the Philippines; that happened decades ago. What’s new is that it makes contraception a public health service and birth control an official ideology.

The Philippines, rich in so many ways, is economically impoverished. According to the Philippines Statistical Authority, 23.7 percent live below the poverty level, where “per capita income is not sufficient to meet their basic food and non-food needs…”

With a total population of 113 million, that’s a lot of poor folks. According to the 2020 Census, the country’s fastest growing population is in Mindanao’s Muslim-dominated Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, with a growth rate of 3.26 percent in just five years preceding the last census. Yet the nation’s overall fertility rate has plummeted from 2.7 in 2017 to below-replacement 1.9 in 2022. That’s fast.

President Bongbong Marcos has vowed to pull the country out of poverty. Fair enough. Who could be against that? The US even had a “War on Poverty” that was a spectacular failure, though it overflowed the rice bowls of many a bureaucrat and “community organizer.” Thank you, Lyndon Baines Johnson! I digress.

Secretary of the Philippines National Economic and Development Authority Arsenio Balisacan says a major reason Filipinos are not as well off as their East Asian neighbours is that “we haven’t entered the demographic dividend.” The UN Population Fund defines demographic dividend as the favourable prospects for economic growth “when the share of the working-age population (15 to 64) is larger than the non-working-age share of the population (14 and younger, and 65 and older).” In other words, an optimum dependency ratio.

Balisacan, a prominent Filipino economist, said the Philippines must capitalise on a “demographic sweet spot” in which population growth is less than the rate of growth of the labour force. The country cannot push up gross domestic product unless enough quality jobs are created.

That “demographic sweet spot” is elusive. A draconian one-child policy brought a short-lived demographic dividend to China. Now the work force falls by millions every year. Other Asian tigers did the same without coercion but lost out as well. Messing with Mother Nature is risky business.

But not to worry, say Philippine authorities. Their problem is just that they’ve got too many people for their limited resources, which impedes getting rich like the Chinese. Family planning is the solution. As Mr Balisacan assures us, “The most basic, most fundamental problem is to get our poor out of their situation and improve access to services so that everybody is lifted up.” Utopia could be just around the corner.

What is happening in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan is no secret. They hit that demographic “sweet spot” and kept going. Now they have the world’s lowest total fertility with no end in sight and are doing backflips urging folks to have children. Does the Philippine government know about that?

When I was a wee lad, my mother once told me “Son, be careful what you wish for.” Momma was right. Somebody leak that to the Philippines.

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The breaching of the dam, apparently caused by a massive explosion or explosions has spilled water from a 16 sq km reservoir across a huge area of the Kherson region of Russian-occupied southern Ukraine. Thousands of people have been evacuated.

The dam’s destruction has led Moscow and Kyiv to accuse each other of what is arguably a war crime. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was conveniently well-prepared with his statement that: “We can already unequivocally declare (this was) deliberate sabotage by the Ukrainian side,” declaring that Kyiv’s aim was to deprive Crimea of water.

There are precedents in Russia’s history for such action. Stalin ordered the destruction of a dam across the Dnipro river in 1941 in the face of invading German forces. Russia also practised a scorched earth policy during Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, leaving the French army little to live on and only the burning ruins of Moscow to capture. Devastating destruction of things that it claims to value appears part of the Russian way of war.

Who benefits?

It is important to note that thus far there is no conclusive proof as to how the dam was breached, although there are widespread reports of an explosion in the early hours of Tuesday morning. But, despite the competing claims in this instance, the key question is who is likely to benefit most from what could develop into a major disaster far beyond the banks of the Dnipro river.

According to Mykhailo Podolyak, one of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s most senior advisers, the answer to this question is clear: to thwart the Ukrainian offensive in this area.

Given where the dam is located, such an argument makes sense. The enormous flood that it has triggered is likely to devastate vast areas on both banks of the Dnipro south towards Crimea. This will make offensive operations by Ukrainian ground forces in this area difficult, probably for months to come, and without similarly weakening Russian defensive lines.

Moreover, it will also make it more difficult for Ukrainian forces to advance further towards Crimea, the peninsula that Russia has illegally occupied since 2014. The dam itself also featured a roadway that Ukrainian forces could have used to advance into the Kherson region as part of their counter offensive. The Dnipro river, now swollen with flood waters, is currently much more difficult to cross for any advancing forces.

Crimea is also affected in another way by this man-made disaster: it crucially depends on the Nova Kakhovka reservoir for drinking water and for irrigation. Being cut off from such supplies, possibly throughout the summer, will have immediate and longer-term humanitarian and economic impacts, the scale of which is difficult to estimate at this time.

Such an act of economic self-harm also begs the question of how committed Russia is to its future in Crimea. It looks more like a bid to inflict long-term damage to the viability of Ukraine as a functioning society and economy.

A third dimension relates to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest such facility. It has been under Russian control since the early weeks of the invasion last year, and the supply of cooling water for its reactors is in jeopardy, although immediate reports are that the situation is under control.

The apparent willingness of Russia to target infrastructure in this way can also be read as indication that Russia lacks the ability to thwart the Ukrainian counter-offensive with conventional military forces. Instead, the Kremlin seems prepared to employ economic and environmental vandalism in an effort to turn the tide in this conflict.

Pinning the blame on Kyiv

The attempt to blame the action on Kyiv is reminiscent of earlier episodes where the Kremlin attempted to construct a narrative about Ukrainian plans to detonate a dirty bomb or accusing Washington of running secret biological and chemical weapons laboratories in Ukraine.

The destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam points to a new phase in this war. It demonstrates Moscow’s effort to control the narrative as to who is responsible for the most heinous acts in the conflict after many months of negative coverage of the Russian conduct of the war.

The Kremlin has also sought to make the most of drone attacks on Moscow which it has similarly painted as acts of “terrorism”.

But the destruction of a dam that held back a body of water the size of America’s Great Salt Lake and provides hydro-electric power and drinking water and irrigation to Crimea suggests a callous disregard for the inhabitants, many of them ethnic Russians.

Despite the Kremlin’s rhetoric, what this episode suggests is that Russia is less interested in liberating Ukraine from its present leadership than it is in destroying its ability to function as a sovereign nation. The forced deportations, kidnapping of 19,000 children and bombing of civilian areas are all aimed at depopulation and long-term damage.

This action is part of that approach, of destroying the country for years to come. But the likely effect of such destructive acts on the population of Ukraine will be to strengthen their resolve to liberate their country, and beyond that to end the Russian threat to their nation in the future.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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June is LGBTQI+ Pride month. US President Biden has proclaimed it as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Pride Month. “We must support LGBTQI+ activists around the globe,” he declared.

Around the world, the rainbow flag has been draped over buildings and streets. New York is hosting not one but eight Pride marches. To the consternation of the Vatican, even the US Embassy to the Holy See is displaying a flag.

The most controversial of all the letters, the transgender T in the rainbow acronym, is being highlighted in the media.

Women’s magazines are featuring trans models on their covers. Glamour UK used a startling image: a pregnant man, Logan Brown. She is an author who has built a reputation on the back of a blog about trans pregnancy, “Up the Duff Man”. Brown is in a relationship with a non-binary drag performer and became pregnant naturally but unexpectedly.

“Everything, all my manlihood that I’ve worked hard for, for so long, just completely felt like it was erased,” Brown told Glamour UK. “It was really hard because how do you tell your partner, ‘Oh, I’m pregnant, but oh, I’m also your boyfriend as well’. It’s just something that you just don’t say as a man.”

An editor explained why the magazine had chosen her. “When we first met Logan and heard his incredible story, we were blown away by his strength and courage. We knew he would be the perfect cover star for our June Pride issue, as a shining example of empowerment, inclusivity and equality.”

At the risk of raining on the June parades, it’s timely to recall that transgender medicine is controversial for a reason – it is risky, experimental and unproven. Not that the major media outlets acknowledge it, but concerns about transgender medicine for children and adolescents are mounting in medical circles. Ignoring this suggests that June is the month not only of LGBTQI+ Pride but of Peak Cognitive Dissonance.

Here are some items gleaned from Gender Clinic News, a thoroughly-researched Substack blog by Australian journalist Bernard Lane.

Australia’s Family Court has been urged to review its laissez-faire approach to adolescent gender transition. In a powerful and informative 132-page report, family law barrister Belle Lane argues that “There is a lack of clinical consensus about what is being treated, the diagnostic process, whether a diagnosis is required, the asserted benefits, risks and outcomes of the medical pathway and what alternative pathways exist … Unfortunately for children and young people, and families who are trying to work through complex issues around identity during a time of distress, this is a highly politicised area. Polarisation and the inability to fully discuss these issues comes at a cost, to young people and their families.”

New Zealand’s Ministry of Health is examining the possibility of a systematic review of puberty blockers, in the wake of similar studies in Finland, Sweden, the UK, and Florida.

An Australian medical insurer, MDA National, has told its members that it will not cover them for claims made by patients under 18 who were advised to undergo gender transition.

A Swedish systematic review published in Acta Paediatrica concluded that “hormonal treatment of gender dysphoria in this age group should be regarded as experimental treatment rather than standard procedure”. After doing a systematic review, the researchers were surprised at how weak the evidence base was for puberty blockers. “I am surprised by the shortage of studies in this field. We found no randomized trials, and only 24 relevant observational studies,” said the lead author.

And transgender medicine is also risky for adults. In a stomach-churning article in the Daily Mail, journalist Caitlin Tilley summarises reports on surgical complications in a wide variety of transgender operations – like mastectomies, phalloplasties and vaginoplasties. For instance, she cites a study of 80 transwomen patients in Canada in a journal called Neurourology and Urodynamics which found that the most common post-operative complaint after their vaginoplasty was pain.

Reports of pain were common and included pain with dilation, pain at a specific site such as the clitoris, incision, scar, introitus, or an anatomic irregularity. There were reports of pain with certain activities such as sex, biking or walking. Many patients reported multiple sources of postsurgical pain. Seven patients reported severe pain (8.8%). Severe pain was identified based on a patient-reported impairment and a score over 7/10 on the numeric pain rating scale.

Admittedly a Daily Mail literature survey is neither peer reviewed nor venerable, unlike competing sources of medical news like the New England Journal of Medicine or The Lancet. But Tilley’s reporting is based on studies in medical journals, not the Daily Mail’s stock in trade of tittle-tattle. Her message is worth repeating: “The truth about transgender surgery… in numbers: Just 16% of gender dysphoria patients go through with the operation, but up to half suffer life-threatening complications”.

If President Biden & Co really cared about LGBTQI+ health, they should investigate the misery that many trans people will be suffering because of gender-affirmative surgery, rather than wave rainbow flags to show how much they care.

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Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature is not shy of controversy. The state regularly makes international headlines for its hard-line immigration policy and its ongoing “war on woke”.

Lawmakers have recently set their sights on reforming the state’s health law. Last month, the Florida legislature passed two major health bills, one of which established a sweeping right to conscientious objection for doctors, medical students, and healthcare institutions.

The new conscientious objection law permits physicians, health providers and medical students in Florida to opt out of providing any medical procedure to which they have a religious, moral or ethical objection.

It is not limited to a narrow set of procedures like abortion or euthanasia (unlike other conscientious objection legislation). Nor does it impose referral requirements on objecting physicians. The bill simply requires that physicians give a patient notice of their objection before an appointment is scheduled.

Unsurprisingly, ethicists have expressed concern about the effect of the law on access to healthcare for vulnerable patient groups, particularly LGBTQ+ patients. Bioethicist Craig Klugman recently said that the “entire purpose of the law is to permit discrimination” and called for a national campaign against the “legislators who pass and governors who sign these bills”.

Physicians are, however, prohibited in the law from denying healthcare to a patient “because of that patient’s or potential patient’s race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin”. That is to say, objections must be to particular procedures, not to classes of patients. A doctor, then, could object to providing abortions because of a moral belief in the sanctity of human life, but she could not object to providing medical care to women, say, or to Latino patients. One media outlet erroneously stated that “the law makes no mention of protections against gender or race-based discrimination”. This is incorrect.

While the bill does not explicitly include “sexuality” in its list of protected patient categories, it does state that “the exercise of the right of medical conscience is limited to conscience-based objections to a specific healthcare service”. As such, the new law does not provide an explicit legal pretext for discrimination against LGBTQI+ patients.

But commentators are perhaps concerned with the collateral effects of this bill rather than its explicit content. The concern seems to be that health law in Ron DeSantis’s Florida is implicitly marginalising minorities – women and queer patients in particular. Commentators are worried that the law could exacerbate health inequalities in a state that already ranks poorly for healthcare access among US states. Only days ago, DeSantis signed a bill banning gender affirming care for minors. Florida has a six-week ban on abortion with limited exceptions.

Kenneth W. Goodman, PhD, professor and director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy, went as far as to say that the law sanctions negligent medical practice:

“To deny care based on unspecified and unarticulated ‘moral, ethical, or religious reasons’ opens the door to neglect, abandonment, and suspicion…It undermines two millennia of a cornerstone of medical ethics: take care of your patients — no matter who they are.”

This is a common argument in the bioethical literature on conscientious objection, namely, that conscience laws pit physician liberties against the welfare and rights of patients, and that patients will ultimately end up second best in jurisdictions where conscientious objection is broadly permitted. The principal duty of a doctor is the welfare of his or her patient, but so-called conscience clauses give inordinate priority to the idiosyncratic views of clinicians and, indeed, open the door to “a pandora’s box” of “value-driven medicine”.

But as I argue in my recent book, Why Conscience Matters: A Defence of Conscientious Objection in Healthcare, conscience laws are not to the detriment of patient welfare and, in fact, critics rely on a prejudicial caricature of conscientious objection when they argue against these laws.

The average conscientious objector is a diligent medical practitioner who is just as concerned about patient welfare as any other doctor but who respectfully disagrees with the morality of particular socially contentious medical procedures. Their convictions are deserving of respect and legal protection.

The burden of proof lies with critics of conscientious objection to show that this is really a problem rather than a poorly evidenced, ideologically motivated campaign against religious healthcare practitioners.

Is it likely that this bill will be replicated in other states? Florida has been described as an “ideas laboratory” for the Republican Party and it is not implausible to suggest that we will see similar legislation in other states in the future.

Would this spell “danger” for health access for minorities? When it comes to heart transplants or routine antibiotics, certainly not. The real concern is precisely the kinds of socially controversial procedures that are at the centre of debates about conscientious objection – abortion, emergency contraception, gender affirming care, and euthanasia. To call this a dangerous development would be to gratuitously assume that these procedures are part of basic medical care rather than being at odds with the proper goals of medicine.

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The Iranian regime is one of the most repressive in the world, ranking 162 out of 165 on the Human Freedom Index. Additionally, on the Human Rights and Rule of Law Index the Islamic Republic of Iran scored 9.8, where 10 is the lowest.

Iranian citizens do not have freedom of expression, religious or political freedom. The rights of women, as well as ethnic and religious minorities are suppressed. Same-sex relationships are criminalized. Capital and corporal punishment are common and due legal process is not guaranteed. Tehran also exports its repressive system beyond its borders, backing Shia militia in other countries and hunting down critics of the regime.

Much of the repression within and outside of Iran is carried out by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an official paramilitary force formed shortly after the Islami Revolution in 1979. The IRGC is tasked with defending the country’s Islamic system and protecting the ideals of the revolution. The two major components of the IRGC are the internal security militia Basij-e Mostazafin (Mobilization Resistance Force), also called Basij, and the external operations force, the IRGC-Qods Force (IRGC-QF), also called Qods. In total the IRGC has between 150,000 and 190,000 personnel, while the IRGC-QF has between 5,000 and 15,000 who were selected from the broader IRGC.

The IRGC reports directly to the country’s Supreme Leader, currently Ayatollah Khamenei. As such, the Corps lies beyond the powers of the nation’s laws and courts. Even the president Ebrahim Raisi has no authority over the IRGC. It is important to note that the Supreme Leader is the head of state, while the president is only the head of government. Consequently, the Supreme Leader is essentially all-powerful and can use the IRGC to carry out his wishes.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been accused of committing various human rights abuses within Iran. The government banned all independent political parties and civil society organizations. Independent trade unions are also prohibited, with striking workers subjected to reprisals. Enforcement of these laws falls to the IRGC who suppresses dissent, leading crackdowns on political opposition, activists, and protesters.

The IRGC helped rig the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who served as president from 2005-2013. When citizens turned out to protest the faulty election, the IRGC attacked them, detaining thousands. The Corps have been known to use live ammunition, birdshot, tear gas, and water cannons to put down protests and peaceful demonstrations.

Arrest and incarceration by the IRGC occur outside of the scope of the judiciary. Prisoners are often tortured, including physical abuse, psychological torment, and denial of access to medical care. Flogging and even blinding are frequent sentences imposed on dissenters. Amnesty International reported that hundreds of people are being held in arbitrary detention, deprived of due process, among them, are “human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists, political dissidents, activists, conservationists, writers, artists, musicians, university students and schoolchildren.”

The US Department of State estimates that during 2022, internal security forces killed “more than 500 people, including at least 69 children, and arrested more than 19,000 protesters, including children.”

Basij-e Mostazafin is responsible for internal security, enforcing state control over society and acting as law enforcement auxiliary. Basij is also responsible for policing morals, and suppressing dissident gatherings. Last year, Basij was accused of suppressing, arresting, beating, and torturing protestors who took part in widespread antigovernment demonstrations. In September and October, they attacked Kurdish opposition groups in Iran’s Kurdistan Region, killing a dozen people, including a pregnant woman. Numerous civilians, both adults and children were injured.  

Beyond the borders of Iran, the IRGC-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) serves as a tool of the Supreme Leader, exporting Islamic Revolution to other countries. The Qods have sent troops to actively fight or serve as advisors, providing training and equipment to state and non-state actors, in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine.

An additional role of the IRGC outside of Iran is targeting Iranian dissidents, exiles, and critics of the regime. Dr Sadegh Sharafkandi and three other Kurdish dissidents were assassinated by the IRGC in 1992, in Berlin, Germany. In 1994, the IRGC was tied to the bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ahmad Mola Nissi, an Iranian-Arab opposition figure, was assassinated by the IRGC in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2017. The group was also responsible for the 2022 stabbing of author Salman Rushdie, in New York.

Since 2003, the IRGC has been supporting Shia militants in Iraq, providing them with roadside bombs that killed Americans. In the wake of the 2011 Arab uprising, the Qods, deployed to Syria. Initially, they claimed to be defending Shia shrines, but in the end, they became a tool of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, suppressing those who opposed his regime. The Qods also fought on the frontlines, alongside Hezbollah and factions of Hamas. When the civil war broke out in Yemen, the IRGC provided Houthi rebels with intelligence support, training, and weapons.

IRGC personnel are suspected of having participated in the Russian annexation of Crimea. Recently, the EU has announced plans to sanction the IRGC Aerospace Force for drones sent to Moscow, to be used in the Ukraine War. Iran has admitted to selling drones to Moscow before the invasion of Ukraine, but claims that they have not done so since the war began. The United States, however, has evidence to the contrary. The US Department of State acknowledges that the assistance rendered by IRGC-Qods Forces to the Russian military in 2022 inflicted significant damage to non-combatants. Iran’s backing of Russia constitutes a breach of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 resulting in the deaths of Ukrainian civilians.

The US has sanctioned the intelligence arm of the IRGC, as well as the IRGC leaders, for their roles in wrongful detentions of U.S. citizens. In 2007, The US Treasury Department designated the IRGC-QF as a foreign terrorist organization, designating former IRGC-QF Commander Qassem Soleimani as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. The current IRGC-QF Commander Sardar Esmail Qaani was also labelled a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2012.

In 2019, President Donald Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization. This was the first time that the US had ever designated a part of a foreign government as a terrorist organization. The designation is significant because entities doing business with, donating to, or otherwise supporting the IRGC can be subject to secondary sanctions for supporting terrorism.

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The high-tech utopia we keep hearing about will have to wait, if a recent pre-print study on laboratory-cultured meat products is to be believed.

According to researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Holtville, “sustainable” meat alternatives have a carbon footprint that is likely “orders of magnitude” higher than retail beef based on current and near-term production methods.

Cultured meat production may be pumping out between four and 25 times more carbon dioxide per kilogram than regular beef, according to the new research, which assessed energy use and greenhouse gas emissions through all stages of production.

If the study passes peer review, its conclusion would be damning: lab-grown meat, long touted as a clean, green alternative to the traditional butcher process, could be harming the planet more than the industry it’s trying to displace.

Truly, who could have guessed that growing meat in giant steel bioreactors using highly-processed pharmaceutical products would be worse for the environment than a herd of cows chewing grass?

The researchers did not rule out the possibility that technological advances that enable a move from using pharmaceutical-grade ingredients to their food-grade equivalents could eventually tip the scales in favour of artificially grown meat.

“It’s possible we could reduce its environmental impact in the future, but it will require significant technical advancement to simultaneously increase the performance and decrease the cost of the cell culture media,” according to UCD food scientist Edward Spang.

However, the team’s findings suggest that in its current state, the lab-grown meat sector is propped up more by hopeful modelling (read: wishful thinking) than favourable present-day data.

Derrick Risner is another of the UCD food scientists who worked on the study. He wrote that their findings were important “given that investment dollars have specifically been allocated to this sector with the thesis that this product will be more environmentally friendly than beef,” adding, “my concern would just be scaling this up too quickly and doing something harmful for the environment”.

According to Science Alert, which reported on the pre-print study:

While cultured meat uses less land than herds of cattle or flocks of sheep, not to mention less water and antibiotics, environmental costs of the highly specific nutrients required to grow the product rapidly add up.

These include running laboratories to extract growth factors from animal serums, as well as growing crops for sugars and vitamins.

Then there’s the energy required to purify all of these broth ingredients to a high standard before they can be fed to the growing meat lumps. This energy-intensive, extreme level of purification is needed to prevent introducing microbes to the culture.

In their research, the California-based team also reviewed the most climate-friendly beef production systems already in operation today. They found that these outperformed even the best synthetic meat processes available.

The California researchers are not the first to have reached the conclusion that real beef is better for the planet than artificial alternatives.

A 2019 University of Oxford study published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems likewise found that the energy used to make cultivated meat could release more greenhouse gases than traditional farming.

Modelling traditional versus lab-grown meat options 1,000 years into the future, the team in Oxford concluded that synthetic meat would only be “climactically superior” depending on “the availability of decarbonized energy generation and the specific production systems that are realized”.

Reporting on the 2019 research, Vox summarised: “Yes, cows produce a lot of methane, and methane is very bad for global warming. Yet it only lasts in the atmosphere for a dozen years. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, lasts more than a century. And you know what releases a lot of CO₂? Labs — including those that make cultured meat.”

So while start-ups in Silicon Valley continue to pour millions of investment capital into poor substitutes with a bigger carbon footprint than Betsy, do your part for the environment and order your favourite fillet next time you dine out.

The post Lab-grown ‘meat’ worse for environment than retail beef: study appeared first on MercatorNet.

As a long-time former editor of Governing magazine, Alan Ehrenhalt is an expert on local political and governance issues in America. More than a quarter of a century ago, he wrote a little-known classic which is essential reading for all those interested in community.

“The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America“ focuses on the city where Ehrenhalt grew up, Chicago, and the era which many Americans of various backgrounds look back on with fondness – the 1950s.

In the years following the release of “The Lost City,” the extraordinary strength of civic life in mid-20th century America was brought to a far larger audience by Professor Robert Putnam.

Here, Ehrenhalt takes the reader on a tour of Chicago (and by extension, America) by focusing on the lives of the parishioners in St Nicholas of Tolentine parish, the people in the African-American urban ghetto of Bronzeville and those living in the new and prosperous suburb of Elmhurst.

Ehrenhalt’s analysis also demonstrates the greater social harmony enjoyed by those labouring under the various constraints of the unspoken social contract which linked community to the existence of strong authority.

Across all three communities, a strong religious pervaded, but particularly in St Nick’s parish, as it was affectionately known.

Here, we get a sense of what urban Catholicism in America was really like. Chicago, Ehrenhalt writes, was the largest American archdiocese, containing more than two million practising Catholics, along with 400 parishes (a number that was then growing by six parishes on average each year) and 300,000 parochial school students.

Here as elsewhere, Irish priests presided over a diverse range of European ethnicities. Not only did the church draw together the great bulk of parishioners each Sunday, it was also the centre for most of the social activity.

For the men, the Holy Name Society reigned supreme, with activities ranging from bowling leagues and golf outings to Eucharistic Adoration and attendance at packed monthly talks.

For women – here as elsewhere the more religiously committed of the sexes – there was the Altar and Rosary Society, whose members cleaned the church, prepared food for parish meetings and promoted Marian devotions within every family home.

In this setting, the source of the authority was clear. The saintly Monsignor Fennessy strode through the parish in his cassock, imparting wisdom in his Irish brogue, while at the same time, his intimidating and authoritarian curate Father Lynch – who had served as a Marine chaplain on the bloodiest beaches during the Pacific campaign – handled the day-to-day running of such a large parish.

Aside from the religious conformism within a pre-Vatican II parish, Ehrenhalt details the various ways in which those living inside the parish’s boundaries had fewer choices than their modern counterparts: including when it came to the jobs they did or the stores they shopped in.

Some were far less fortunate. Black Chicagoans had far less say over where they could live, let alone what they could do with their lives.

In this community known as Bronzeville, institutions such as black churches, black businesses and social institutions (such as the Chicago Defender newspaper) and the Democratic Party machine were of paramount importance.

The exodus to suburbia was one of the most consequential social processes in the 20th century, and Ehrenhalt’s third profile is of one such community to the west of the city, where many World War II veterans flocked to raise their families in peace and prosperity.

In Elmhurst, civic society had to be created almost from scratch, and the spirit of this epoch allowed for this: indeed, it necessitated it.

“The new suburbanites were not fleeing community, or even the particular communities they were leaving behind… But they believed, with the faith of the 1950s, that community was something they could simply recreate in the place they were moving to. And they did everything they could to recreate it, with an energy that sometimes bordered on compulsiveness,” the author writes.

Throughout the book, Ehrenhalt is at pains to avoid engaging in a nostalgia-driven argument, and he freely acknowledges that the near-universal popularity of social clubs, functions and organisations carried with it disadvantages for those who would have preferred a more detached or independent life.

There were also real limits to the meaningfulness of much of this togetherness. One burst of enthusiasm in Elmhurst led to the creation of a new Presbyterian church which quickly developed into a large congregation.

This new suburban religiosity, though, had clear parallels with the rise of popular preachers who Ehrenhalt suggests “seemed to offer religion as something comfortable and almost effortless, a pleasant reassurance against personal doubt and insecurity.”

Ehrenhalt cannot be fairly accused of looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, and he also makes clear that the restoration of a greater sense of community (which most people today likely aspire to) can hardly come about with the restoration of social authority (which most people today would likely recoil from).

“Authority and community have in fact unravelled together, but few mourn the passing of authority,” he reflects.

Disciplinarian teachers, stern parents and harsh clerics who preached an uncompromising Gospel were never popular, but they played an important role in preserving an orderly way of life.

Indeed, Ehrenhalt notes the way in which the common perception of widespread social repression prior to the social revolution of the 60s (including in popular history and literature) often comes directly from the pen of those who were disgruntled with their minority status within a broadly contented social milieu.

“Much of the image of American Catholic life in those years comes from the work of former Catholics who considered the church they grew up in not only authoritarian but destructive of their free choices and creative instincts,” Ehrenhalt explains, before adding that “[i]f you visit a working-class Catholic parish in a big city, and ask the older parishioners what they think of the church in the days before Vatican II, they don’t tell you that it was tyrannical or that it destroyed their individuality. They tell you they wish they could have it back.”

Ehrenhalt vivid description of Chicago’s neighbourhoods in the heyday of civic engagement and the subsequent decline ties in neatly with the work of other authors who have focused on community, and in particular the ground-breaking work of Robert Nisbet.

As with the central argument of “The Lost City,” Nisbet’s criteria for defining community made clear that some form of authority had to exist – which he observed came about through habit or custom.

Even more striking (and to some, off-putting) than Ehrenhalt’s emphasis on moral authority is the stress which he places on sin: the common belief that it truly existed, and that it had to be resisted.

Towards the end of “The Lost City,” Ehrenhalt revisits the three communities to show how much had changed. Gone are the lines outside the confessionals of the much more sparsely attended St Nick’s and gone are the cassocks which the priests once wore.

In Elmhurst, the close-knit and geographically based ties which were established so quickly had fallen apart to be replaced by much looser connections, with one of the key driving forces being the rise of two-job families where neither parent had the time needed “at home for the gestures of community that bound the original residents together.”

And while the residents of what was Bronzeville now had immeasurably more freedom in a racially integrated city, many of the more affluent black citizens had exercised that freedom to leave to find new homes in areas less plagued by social dysfunction and crime.

Ehrenhalt’s analysis is profound and has relevance far beyond Chicago. A similar decline to what occurred in St Nick’s parish can be witnessed in more extreme form in a country like Ireland, where the moral authority of the Catholic priesthood had been even more elevated, and where its fall from grace has been even more precipitous.

The author’s wise reflections on the false and ahistorical narrative which has been created about the recent past certainly deserves the attention of those aspiring to set right the historical record in time.

There is little hope of a sudden return to community, but Ehrenhalt notes the various examples in recent history (such as Victorian Britain) where ordered liberty was restored after a period of social disorder.

“For that to happen anytime soon,” he concludes, “the generations that launched the rebellion will have to force itself to rethink some of the unexamined ‘truths’ with which it has lived its entire adult life. It will have to recognise that privacy, individuality, and choice are not free goods, and that the society that places no restrictions on them pays a high price for that decision.”

Everything that has occurred since the publication of this book in 1996 suggests that those who have led the liberal charge towards ever greater permissiveness will not pause to consider what has been lost, as well as what has been gained.

Those who recognise the value of a communitarian bargain that places limits on our behaviour can still learn from Ehrenhalt and take heart from the prospect that what was torn down could yet again be recreated.

The post ‘The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America’ appeared first on MercatorNet.

The advent of June means annual Gay Pride Season is here, that one month of the year (apart from the other eleven) when homosexuality is officially promoted by the State all across the Western world. You can’t move for LGBTQ rainbow flags of one sort or another out in public these days, the symbol’s new-found all-pervasiveness leading some sceptics to compare it to a Nazi swastika.

During last year’s Pride Month, UK actor turned politician Laurence Fox, leader of the small anti-woke Reclaim Party and former candidate for London Mayor, marked the occasion by posting the mocking refrain “Oh blessed and most holy month!” together with the following doctored image of Pride flags to his 300,000-plus followers on Twitter:

Fox was speedily criticised by Jewish and Holocaust Memorial groups, as well as being temporarily Twitter-banned for causing offence. But, as Fox argued, the freedom to cause offence is just one aspect of freedom of speech. Furthermore, by suspending him, the pre-Elon Musk social media giant was demonstrating clear double-standards, as “You can openly call the [Union Jack] a symbol of fascism and totalitarianism” on the site but “You cannot criticise the holy flags” of Gay Pride.

As if to prove this, Fox’s then-Deputy Leader in the Reclaim Party, Martin Daubney, posted the following tweet, recasting Britain’s flag as a mashed-up Nazi swastika too:

“So, is this worthy of a ban?” he asked. As far as I am aware, the answer was “no”, and so Daubney kept his account. Unlike gays, patriots can be compared to fascists with total impunity.

Fox’s Book of Martyrs

Pride 2022 came not long after the Platinum Jubilee celebrations marking 70 years of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, an occasion marked both by an outbreak of mass Union Jack flag-waving amongst the patriotic general public, and an equal outbreak of flag-hating amongst the ostentatiously unpatriotic hard-left.

Again hoping to illustrate his opponents’ double-standards here, Fox retweeted the following contribution from conservative-leaning political commentator Dominique Samuels, showing Pride flags arrayed all down what was actually central London, but looked rather more like some hypothetical gay Nuremberg:

Some people may find the Nazi comparison overblown. Yet it is not that Fox or his allies were literally claiming that Gay Pride Month is as bad as actual Nazism here, as some critics chose to misinterpret matters, more that the Pride flag and the swastika were similar in a generic sense, i.e., as very visible symbols of enforced ideological conformity. Fox could have digitally added the Communist hammer and sickle to the flag instead and made his point equally as well.

As Fox said, public “acceptance and celebration” of the flag were now ruthlessly “enforced with a sense of hectoring authoritarianism.” It was not as if Queer Quislings were about to start another Holocaust or invade Poland, but they might well try and get you sacked, cancelled or even imprisoned.

As if to prove this, one of Fox’s rival metropolitan politicians, Green Party London Assembly Member Caroline Russell, used her position of political influence to plead with the police to arrest the brazen thought-criminal, an appeal Fox quickly responded to:

The Fascistic Mr Fox?

Fox may not have been arrested by the thought-police himself, but a private citizen with a much less awkwardly prominent national media profile soon was. Darren Brady, a 51-year-old British Army veteran from Aldershot, retweeted Laurence’s original rainbow swastika meme, then found himself placed in handcuffs by Hampshire Police on the grounds his action had “caused anxiety” to some unnamed complainant.

Hampshire Police had offered to downgrade Brady’s “offence” from a full-blown criminal incident to a mere “non-crime” (which it already was anyway), if he had only agreed to remove his post and pay them £80 to attend an in-house Maoist gay re-education course. Brady bravely refused, instead informing Laurence Fox directly about what was going on.

Fox then turned up at Brady’s home together with ex-policeman Harry Miller of the Bad Law Project campaign group, who was then himself also arrested for obstructing the police in their duties. Fox captured all this on film, accusing the cops of acting “like the Gestapo”, no doubt prompting more complaints from left-wingers angry about precisely the wrong thing here.

Political football

Britain is hardly alone in its increasing public replacement of the national flag with the rainbow one. During the 2022 FIFA World Cup held over in Qatar, the US soccer team made headlines after redesigning their badge so the usual red and white of the Stars and Stripes was replaced with garish gay rainbow colours instead, on the walls of their training-base and media branding.

Objecting to their Qatari hosts’ highly negative legal attitudes towards homosexuality, “Be The Change” now became the US team’s main slogan rather than, say, “Kick The Ball”, which is what they’re supposed to be paid to do, pure and simple, nothing else. “ONE NATION”, reads the US rainbow badge’s accompanying slogan. No: TWO NATIONS, by specific design.

By transforming their badge into blatant ideological propaganda, US Soccer recklessly subverted the formerly largely neutral and uniting image of the national flag and replaced it with the contentious, fragmenting political emblem of an agenda which is clearly not agreed upon by all. The message is as clear as it is queer: unless you, too, support the specific partisan line being pushed here, then you’re not truly an American, and your support is just not wanted. And yet, despite this, “We are a group that believes in inclusivity,” the team’s Newspeak-fluent goalkeeper Sean Johnson claimed.

Apart from all those who disagree with your agenda, of course, Sean: they are not true Americans at all, just worthless Far-Right bigots. They must be excluded, not included. Homosexuals were perfectly free to support national sports teams before their players all suddenly became swathed in rainbows for no good reason, you know: persons of any sexuality could, it was a complete and utter irrelevancy to all concerned. But no longer, it would appear.

The US soccer team “isn’t representing America” any more, one irritated fan accurately complained online. “America’s colors aren’t rainbow.” Indeed not, but that is the whole point.

Flags of convenience

Liberals of today wish to dismantle their countries’ national flags as a proxy for dismantling their nations themselves, in a much wider sense. The flag, as microcosmic symbol of a macrocosmic nation state, embodies a real, particular, settled physical community with borders, based upon timeless things such as a shared language, culture, traditions, religions and ethnicity.

Contemporary Western liberals – both progressive, transnationalism-loving left-wing social ones and GDP-worshipping right-wing economic ones alike – would much prefer to replace this very concrete and limited concept with something much more abstract and limitless instead, a more homogenised, borderless, truly global society based on allegiance to supposedly “universal” human values, not traditional particularist ones – like Gay Pride, for example.

The rainbow flag stands as a proxy for this impossible dream. It is a flag not of any actual existing nation, but of the desired imaginary, non-existent, progressive, universalist non-nation of tomorrow: that is, the flag of Utopia. And the word “utopia”, etymologically speaking, means, quite literally, “no-place”. That is what you are really being forced to salute when paying enforced obeisance to the gaybow flag – the intended (but never actually to be achieved) perpetual liberal-enforced global moral dictatorship or New Jerusalem of tomorrow.

In the disingenuous name of freedom, all soon-to-be non-nations must be forced to kneel to this flag: even non-Western ones which do not belong to us, like the Muslim nations of the Middle East, the majority of whose populations and rulers simply do not share our own present rulers’ supposedly “universal” values at all. Under other, non-gay-related circumstances, this process would surely be labelled pejoratively as “colonialism”, would it not?

One nation under God

Another flag-related controversy to hit during the 2022 World Cup came when US Soccer, advertising an upcoming match between USA and Iran, posted an image of the Iranian national flag which had been doctored to remove the large red emblem which normally sits in its centre.

Significantly, the emblem in question is actually a written word: “Allah”, the holy Muslim name for God. US Soccer said they had erased God’s name to show solidarity with the women of Iran who were then being persecuted by the ruling extremist clerics simply for, as US Soccer put it, “fighting for [their] basic human rights”. I have some personal sympathy for the oppressed females of Iran myself, but the unspoken symbolism of this act was very telling.

Here is a particularist local or national value – belief in the Muslim God – being erased in favour of a transnational globalist abstraction – human rights. However, human rights are not universal, because, whatever progressives might say to the contrary, many human values are not universal either. Most people over here in the West might think it awful the women of Iran don’t have full political rights and freedoms; but, likewise, most people over there in Iran might think it equally appalling women in the West have the freedom and right to marry one another and raise children.

Like alchemy in reverse

No culture’s values are entirely universal. Each particular set of human values is particular to each particular nation, empire, culture or civilisation. Ironically, those traditions and values which do seem closest to being genuinely near-universal in nature – ones relating to core things like family structure, sexuality, gender binaries, crime and punishment, in-group ethnic allegiance, and so forth – are precisely the ones our own utopian universalists are currently doing their very best to try and dissolve along with our traditional flags.   

There is a saying of the alchemists of old: “solve et coagula”, or “dissolve and then coagulate”, used to describe the melting down of separate chemical substances and then re-amalgamation of them all together into one large, undifferentiated mass within the furnaces and alembics of their demon-haunted laboratories, in impossible pursuit of making gold.

When the flags of all nations, with their multifarious separate colours and patterns, begin to be melted down by globalists and then reconstituted anew into more generic multicoloured rainbow ones intended to be flown in every nation under the sun instead, even those that don’t want to, like Iran and Qatar, forging all that was once separate and different into one generic and eye-offending lumpen mass, then an analogously similar process is at work.  

Coincidentally, the classic alchemical process was said to have several distinct separate stages to it, each bearing a different colour, like green, yellow or red: the colours, in fact, of the rainbow. (And, in terms of the common alchemical stages of whiteness, blackness, etc, those of the new extended Progress Pride flag so easily transformed into a swastika by parodists online.)

Yet literal-minded alchemists, both then and now, have always proved themselves sadly deluded. What results from today’s process of enforced political alchemy will surely not be a utopian world of purest gold. Instead, it is more likely to be a dystopian dictatorial realm of basest lead. A world, for instance, in which innocent military veterans can be arrested for posting harmless, but politically incorrect, joke images online.

Instead of doctoring his rainbow flags into swastikas last year, perhaps Laurence Fox should actually have defaced them all with hermetic occult sigils of the Philosophers’ Stone instead.

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