Seigneurs, sachiez qui or ne s’en ira. Crusade chant by René Zosso with the Clemencic Consort. Original song by Thibaut de Champagne (1201-1253) count of Champagne, king of Navarre.

1239, the Pope Grégoire IX issues a call to arms in order to free the Holy Land from the Muslim invaders. Thibaut leads this crusade and write this song to convince people to follow him.

Lyrics translation :

Milords, those who will not travel
To this land where God lived and died
And will not take the holy cross
May not go to heaven

Who has no pity and remembrance,
Shall to the High Lord seek his vengeance,
To free his land and country

Bad people will stay behind,
They do not love God, honour his name and pray him
Everybody has in mind ” What will do my wife?”
Do not leave her with somebody whoever he is
It would be silly
There are no friends, whithout any doubts,
Except the one who was crucified,

And, courageous squires will go
They love God and honor him with this Hill,
They will slightly go to God
And people that deserve to be scorn will stay,
Blind are -do not doubt of this –
Those who do not help God, at least once during their life
And for such ridiculous things, lost such glory

Mary, crowned queen,
Pray for us, Mary,
Then, nothing can stop us

The Knights Templar warned throughout the migrant crisis that the millions crashing through Europe's frontiers were incompatible with our values and way of life (not to mention ISIS had boasted that it had used the crisis to smuggle hundreds of its most fanatical terrorists into Europe by blending in with the migrants.)

Only now, the penny seems to have dropped for one prominent German globalist...

A furious row has broken out between a left-wing feminist and a number of conservative-inclined alternative media outlets. One such report was carried by Russia Insider:

“In 2012 Rebecca Sommer founded the refugee aid association Arbeitsgruppe Flucht + Menschen-Rechte (AG F+M) [Working Group Asylum + Human Rights]. At the end of 2015, this artist, photographer and journalist and documentary maker applauded Angela Merkel’s decision to open German’s borders to the “refugees” who had been blocked in Hungary, despite the vacuum effect this would create.

“At that time I wanted to help everyone and truly believed that all these people were fleeing hell and were in a state of complete distress,” the German activist explained in an article published by the conservative Polish weekly  Do Rzeczy  on 15 January, discussing how she woke up to reality.

In 2015, her NGO had almost 300 volunteers who were giving German courses to the new arrivals.

…”I thought their medieval view was going to change with time…but after having seen these situations occur repeatedly and observing what was happening around me, as a volunteer, I have had to recognise that the Muslim refugees have grown up with values that are totally different, they have undergone brainwashing from childhood on and are indoctrinated by Islam and absolutely do not intend to adopt our values. Worse, they regard we infidels with disdain and arrogance.”

“It was a jarring perception when I noticed that these people I had helped, who were eating, drinking, dancing and laughing with me, who didn’t pray, who didn’t go to the mosque, who didn’t respect Ramadan, who made fun of religion and deeply religious people, called me ‘the stupid German whore’ when they were eating my food and were in my garden.”

…Rebecca Sommer says she is not an isolated case, that many other volunteers also came ultimately to have the same perception and that there are now far fewer volunteers ready to work with the new arrivals today in Germany. She also acknowledges that, through their numbers, these Muslim immigrants pose a threat to the German way of life, and that this will get worse with family reunification.

She also told the Polish weekly magazine Do Rzeczy that she personally knows Germans who are getting ready to emigrate to Poland because they had have enough, and she added: “If Poland and Hungary do not give in on this question, you could become countries that some Germans and French will flee to. You could become islands of stability in Europe.”

Islands of stability but also democracy because Rebecca Sommer also notes that democracy no longer really exists in Germany….When the human rights activists wanted to denounce forced conversions to Islam in Indonesia, her account was blocked.…

This Berlin woman no longer dares to go out on her own on New Year’s Eve and she has already been attacked five times by men speaking Arabic!

She thinks it is already too late for Germany and she plans to emigrate for her retirement. Political Islam is present everywhere, including in the government, in political parties, in the police and schools. With family reunification, millions of additional Muslim immigrants are going to come. In the German capital where she lives, entire districts are already dominated by the Muslim community which forms a parallel society.”

Ms Sommers, however, has accused the online outlets of ‘fake news’. Yet she has failed to say what is ‘fake’ about the reports, and looking at the original interview they are quoting, their interpretation appears generally accurate and fair.

The only thing that appears to be in doubt is the fact that they ran the story under headlines saying that she plans to emigrate to Poland when she retires. Looking carefully at the text, Sommers spoke about Germans and other Europeans emigrating to Poland, but for herself spoke only of emigrating, without specifying where.

Which, of course, is a bit of slightly sloppy sub-editing, not ‘fake news’ at all!

An operation that began as a seemingly obscure academic discussion three years ago is now becoming a full-blown propaganda campaign by some of the most powerful institutions in the industrialized world. This is what rightly should be termed the War on Cash1. Like the War on Terror, the War on Cancer or the War on Drugs, its true agenda is sinister and opaque. If we are foolish enough to swallow the propaganda for complete elimination of cash in favor of pure digital bank money, we can pretty much kiss our remaining autonomy and privacy goodbye. George Orwell’s 1984 will be here on steroids.

Let me be clear. Here we discuss not various block-chain digital technologies, so-called crypto-currencies. We are not addressing private payment systems such as China’s WeChat. Nor do we discuss e-banking or use of bank credit cards such as Visa or Master Card or others. These are of an entirely different quality from the goal of the ongoing sinister war on cash. They are all private services not state.

What we are discussing is a plot, and it is a plot, by leading central banks, select governments, the International Monetary Fund in collusion with major international banks to force citizens—in other words, us!—to give up holding cash or using it to pay for purchases. Instead we would be forced to use digital bank credits.

The difference, subtle though it may at first seem, is huge. As in India following the mad Modi US-inspired war on cash late in 2016, citizens would forever lose their personal freedom to decide how to pay or their privacy in terms of money. If I want to buy a car and pay cash to avoid bank interest charges, I cannot. My bank will limit the amount of digital money I can withdraw on any given day. If I want to stay in a nice hotel to celebrate a special day and pay cash for reasons of privacy, not possible. But this is just the surface.

Visa joins the war

This July, Visa International rolled out what it calls “The Visa Cashless Challenge.” With select buzz words about how technology has transformed global commerce, Visa announced a program to pay selected small restaurant owners in the USA if they agree to refuse to accept cash from their customers but only credit cards.

The official Visa website announces, “Up to $500,000 in awards. 50 eligible food service owners. 100% cashless quest.” Now for a mammoth company such as Visa with annual revenues in the $15 billion range, a paltry $500,000 is chump change. Obviously they believe it will advance use of Visa cards in a market that until now prefers cash—the small family restaurant.

The Visa “challenge” to achieve what it calls the “100% cashless quest” is no casual will-o’-the-wisp. It is part of a very thought-through strategy of not only Visa, but also the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund and the Reserve Bank of India to name just a few.

IMF on Boiling Frogs

In March this year the International Monetary Fund in Washington issued a Working Paper on what they call “de-cashing.” The paper recommends that, “going completely cashless should be phased in steps.” It notes the fact that there already exist “initial and largely uncontested steps, such as the phasing out of large denomination bills, the placement of ceilings on cash transactions, and the reporting of cash moves across the borders. Further steps could include creating economic incentives to reduce the use of cash in transactions, simplifying the opening and use of transferrable deposits, and further computerizing the financial system.”

In France since 2015 the limit a person may pay in cash to a business is a mere €1000 “to tackle money laundering and tax evasion.” Moreover, any deposit or withdrawal of cash from a bank account in excess of €10,000 in a month will automatically be reported to Tracfin, a unit of the French government charged with combating money laundering, “largely uncontested steps” and very ominous portents.

The IMF paper further adds as argument for eliminating cash that “de-cashing should improve tax collection by reducing tax evasion.” Said with other words, if you are forced to use only digital money transfers from a bank, the governments of virtually every OECD country today have legal access to the bank data of their citizens.

In April, a month after the IMF paper on de-cashing, the Brussels EU Commission released a statement that declared, “Payments in cash are widely used in the financing of terrorist activities. In this context, the relevance of potential upper limits to cash payments could also be explored. Several Member States have in place prohibitions for cash payments above a specific threshold.”

Even in Switzerland, as a result of relentless campaigns by Washington, their legendary bank secrecy has been severely compromised under the fallacious argument it hinders financing of terrorist organizations. A glance at recent European press headlines about attacks from Barcelona to Munich to London to Charlottesville exposes this argument as a sham.

Today in the EU, as further result of Washington pressure, under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) banks outside the USA where US citizens hold a deposit are forced to file yearly reports on the assets in those accounts to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the US Treasury. Conveniently for the US as the major emerging tax haven, the US Government has refused, despite it being specified in the Act, to join FACTA itself

In 2016 the European Central Bank discontinued issuing €500 bills arguing it would hinder organized crime and terrorism, a poor joke to be sure, as if the sophisticated networks of organized crime depend on paper currencies. In the US, leading economists such as former Harvard President Larry Summers advocate eliminating the $100 bill for the same alleged reason.

$10 limit?

The real aim of the war on cash however was outlined in a Wall Street Journal OpEd by Harvard economist and former chief economist at the IMF, Kenneth Rogoff. Rogoff argues that there should be a drastic reduction in the Federal Reserve’s issuance of cash. He calls for all bills above the $10 bill to be removed from circulation, thereby forcing people and businesses to depend on digital or electronic payments solely. He repeats the bogus mantra that his plan would reduce money-laundering, thereby reduce crime while at the same time exposing tax cheats.

However the hidden agenda in this War on Cash is confiscation of our money in the next, inevitable banking crisis, whether in the EU member countries, the United States or developing countries like India.

Already several central banks have employed a policy of negative interest rates alleging, falsely, that this is necessary to stimulate growth following the 2008 financial and banking crisis. In addition to the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the Danish National Bank adhere to this bizarre policy. However, their ability to lower interest rates to member banks even more is constrained as long as cash is plentiful.

Here the above cited IMF document lets the proverbial cat out of the sack. It states, “In particular, the negative interest rate policy becomes a feasible option for monetary policy if savings in physical currency are discouraged and substantially reduced. With de-cashing, most money would be stored in the banking system, and, therefore, would be easily affected by negative rates, which could encourage consumer spending…” That’s because your bank will begin to charge you for the “service” of allowing you to park your money with them where they can use it to make more money. To avoid that, we are told, we would spend like there’s no tomorrow. Obviously, this argument is fake.

As German economist Richard Werner points out, negative rates raise banks’ costs of doing business. “The banks respond by passing on this cost to their customers. Due to the already zero deposit rates, this means banks will raise their lending rates.” As Werner further notes, “In countries where a negative interest rate policy has been introduced, such as Denmark or Switzerland, the empirical finding is that it is not effective in stimulating the economy. Quite the opposite. This is because negative rates are imposed by the central bank on the banks – not the borrowing public.

He points out that the negative interest rate policy of the ECB is aimed at destroying the functioning, traditionally conservative EU savings banks such as the German Sparkassen and Volksbanken in favor of covertly bailing out the giant and financially corrupt mega-banks such as Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Societe Generale of France, Royal Bank of Scotland, Alpha Bank of Greece, or Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in Italy and many others. The President of the ECB, Mario Draghi is a former partner of the mega bank, Goldman Sachs.

Why Now?

The relevant question is why now, suddenly the urgency of pushing for elimination of cash on the part of central banks and institutions such as the IMF? The drum roll for abolishing cash began markedly following the January 2016 Davos, Switzerland World Economic Summit where the western world’s leading government figures and central bankers and multinational corporations were gathered. The propaganda offensive for the current War on Cash offensive began immediately after the Davos talks.

Several months later, in November, 2016, guided by experts from USAID and, yes, Visa, the Indian government of Narenda Modi announced the immediate demonetization or forced removal of all 500 Rupee (US$8) and 1,000 Rupee (US$16) banknotes on the recommendation of the Reserve Bank of India. The Modi government claimed that the action would curtail the shadow economy and crack down on the use of illicit and counterfeit cash to fund illegal activity and terrorism.

Notably, the Indian Parliament recently made a follow-up study of the effects of the Modi war on cash. The Parliamentary Committee on Demonetization report documented that not a single stated objective was met. No major black money was found and Demonetization had no effect on terror funding, the reasons given by the Government to implement such a drastic policy. The report noted that while India’s central bank was allegedly attacking black money via demonetization, the serious illegal money in offshore tax havens was simply recycled back into India, “laundered” via Foreign Direct Investment by the criminal or corporate groups legally in a practice known as “Round Tripping.”

Yet the Parliament’s report detailed that the real Indian economy was dramatically hit. Industrial Production in April declined by a shocking 10.3 percent over the previous month as thousands of small businesses dependent on cash went under. Major Indian media have reportedly been warned by the Modi government not to publicize the Parliament report.

If we connect the dots on all this, it becomes clearer that the war on cash is a war on our individual freedom and degrees of freedom in our lives. Forcing our cash to become digital is the next step towards confiscation by the governments of the EU or USA or wherever the next major banking crisis such as in 2007-2008 erupts.

In late July this year Estonia as rotating presidency of the EU issued a proposal backed by Germany that would allow EU national regulators to “temporarily” stop people from withdrawing their funds from a troubled bank before depositors were able to create a bank “run.” The EU precedent was already set in Cyprus and in Greece where the government blocked cash withdrawals beyond tiny daily amounts.

As veteran US bank analyst Christopher Whelan points out in a recent analysis of the failure of the EU authorities to effectively clean up their banking mess since the 2008 financial crisis, “the idea that the banking public – who generally fall well-below the maximum deposit insurance limit – would ever be denied access to cash virtually ensures that deposit runs and wider contagion will occur in Europe next time a depository institution gets into trouble.” Whelan points out that nine years after the 2008 crisis, EU banks remain in horrendous condition. “There remains nearly €1 trillion in bad loans within the European banking system. This represents 6.7% of the EU economy. That’s huge. He points out that banks’ bad loans as share of GDP for US and Japan banks are 1.7 and 1.6 percent respectively.

As governments, whether in the EU or in India or elsewhere refuse to rein in fraudulent practices of its largest banks, forcing people to eliminate use of cash and keep all their liquidity in digital deposits with state regulated banks, sets the stage for the state to confiscate those assets when they declare the next emergency. If we are foolish enough to permit this scam to pass unchallenged perhaps we deserve to lose our vestige of financial autonomy. Fortunately, popular resistance against elimination of cash in countries like Germany is massive. Germans recall the days of the 1920s Weimar Republic and hyperinflation as the 1931 banking crises that led to the Third Reich. The IMF approach is that of the Chinese proverb on boiling frogs slowly. But human beings are not frogs, or?

Originally Posted at: Katehon 

There is a Christian revival going on across Europe – but the atheistic liberal controlled mainstream media refuse to tell us about it.

Here is an interesting video from Dr. Stephen Turley. His basic argument is that there is a worldwide turn to conservative values, traditionalism, and nationalism, in the US, Eastern Europe, the EU, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, South America, in fact, all continents, and that this change is being driven by the loosening of the liberal, globalist grip on information flow due to technology.

Turley hosts a rapidly growing YouTube broadcast where he discusses these trends and political events generally from a conservative viewpoint.

WALSH: There Must Be A Purge

In The Catholic Church. And It Must Be Brutal.

The President gets it! Now we just have to hope that this is another promise that Donald Trump will keep, because he is the only man on the Planet with the power to ensure free speech on the WorldWideWeb.

President Donald Trump has accused social media companies of ‘totally discriminating against ‘conservative voices.’

‘Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen,’ the President tweeted early Saturday morning.

‘They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.

‘Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police.

President Donald Trump has spoken out clearly against social media companies for ‘totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices’

Though Trump was not specific, he was likely reacting to the recent decision by tech giants Google, Facebook, Spotify, and Apple to ban the controversial conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Earlier this week, Twitter Inc banned Jones and his website Infowars from tweeting for seven days, saying their tweets violated company’s rules against ‘abusive behaviour’ – in reality any comments or images that offend liberals or refute their crackpot far-left ideas.

The attack on Info Wars is only the tip of an iceberg of thoroughly illiberal censorship by Big Tech. As the KTI have said repeatedly, this is much more than the left being ‘sore losers’. The censorship drive aims to ‘deplatform’ (i.e. gag) EVERY voice which will speak up for President Trump and the American Constitution when the elite move to impeach and remove him.

And, in the UK, for a real Brexit when the elite try to deliver a ‘deal’ that fails to deliver what the people voted for.

It is also part of a campaign to restore the corporate monopoly over the formation of public opinion, which is why whatever Mr Trump does to address this problem will be attacked hysterically by every single ‘mainstream’ news outlet in the english-speaking world.

The Big Tech assault on free speech over the last year has been devastating, destroying not just dissident but hugely popular platforms, but also wiping out thousands of small and medium sized businesses and fund-raising operations.

The President is absolutely right in his analysis; let us hope that he puts the same amount of work and intelligent thinking into his plan to bring Big tech to heel and restore free speech online. His future depends on it, as well as a great deal else. Let us hope and pray he gets it right, first time.

The BBC has exposed an imam who preached calls for Jihad at the mosque where Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi and his family prayed.

Mustafa Graf encouraged followers to ‘take action’ at the Didsbury Mosque in Manchester on December 16, 2016.

‘We ask Allah to grant them Mujahideen – our brothers and sisters right now in Aleppo and Syria and Iraq – to grant them victory’, he says.

‘Jihad for the sake of Allah is the source of pride and dignity for this nation’ – by which, of course, he meant the ‘nation’ of Islam and not Britain.

‘Brothers and sisters, it is time to act, not only to talk… Lots of brothers stay behind unfortunately, they love Islam and Muslims but they do nothing about the support of their brothers and sisters,’ he said.

Graf criticised Europe, America and the ‘so-called civilised world’ for watching on as the war ravaged Syria.

Abedi and his family regularly attended the mosque and his father – sometimes led the call to prayer.

In the days after the attack Graf came out an assured the public the mosque did not back the views of Abedi. But Usama Hasan, Head of Islamic Studies at Quilliam, has said he wouldn’t be surprised if Salman Abedi’s horrific suicide bombing was partly inspired by the sermon.

‘He’s giving them the narrative of them against us’, Islamic scholar Shaykh Rehan told BBC News.

‘The jihad he’s referring to here is actually being on the battlefield, there’s no if’s and no buts in this’.

‘He is psychologically and practically brainwashing young people into either travelling or to do something to take action.’

His daughter Eve was severely brain damaged, unable to speak, eat, or move the left side of her body.

‘I’d probably take him round to see Eve. I don’t think I’d need to say anything.’

At least five men who attended the mosque either went to fight in Syria or were jailed for supporting ISIS, according to the BBC.

The BBC documentary is a good piece of work. Unfortunately, it cannot make up for the role of the BBC in fanning hysteria about events in Libya and Syria among Britain’s Sunni Muslim community.

For six whole years, the BBC has relentlessly regurgitated the propaganda of the AlQaeda PR department, particularly their ‘White Helmets’ sub-group. In that, of course, they have only followed the line of the Conservative government, which has given the Islamist propaganda machine millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

The BBC also failed to reveal that Graf’s own propaganda campaign in favour of the Islamist rebels who destroyed Libya with the help of David Cameron was aided by North West of England Tory MEP Sajjad Karim and by his local Labour MP and the Manchester Evening News.

The collective guilt of the UK government and the liberal mass media in all this featured in the following report, issued by the KTI Intelligence Department and updated last December:

Look what they’re covering up now! The mainstream media have reported on the jailing of a Manchester-based Libyan man for ten years for belonging to ISIS. They have reported on how he and his friends got into ISIS after fighting in Libya in 2011. But they have carefully avoided the fact that the Manchester terror cell to which he, and his close friend Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, belonged was formed as a direct result of the British government and security services trying to use radical Muslims as weapons to achieve ‘regime change’ in Libya. 

The Daily Mail was among the media outlets that reported on the conviction of Mohammed Abdallah:

“Footage has emerged of the jihadi linked to the Manchester Arena bomber fighting with militants in Libya before he tried to become an ISIS sniper.

“Mohammed Abdallah and his brother Abdalraouf were at the centre of a Manchester-based terror network which included Salman Abedi, who killed 22 at the Ariana Grande concert earlier this year.

“As unemployed former drug dealer Abdallah was jailed for 10 years today, footage showed him and his brother during a spell they spent in Libya fighting along militants in the country’s civil war.

“The brothers, who grew up in Manchester had dual Libyan nationality, joined the ‘Tripoli Brigade’ when the north African country fell apart in 2011.”

Hold it right there! Because the Tripoli Brigade was not some random bunch of Jihadi crazies. It was a part of the so-called National Liberation Army, the umbrella force organised to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. The NLA was the ground-force backed by none other than David Cameron, who turned the RAF into the air arm of the Islamist rebellion.

It was founded, organised and led by Mahdi al-Harati, a Libyan-Irish citizen. It was armed by the CIA, through the American puppet regime in Qatar. The brigade included officers who had lived most of their lives in English speaking countries including Ireland, Canada, UK and the US.

An article in Ireland’s Sunday World drew attention to relations between Mahdi al-Harati and an unnamed US intelligence agency.

According to the article on November 6, 2011, €200,000 in cash was stolen from al-Harati’s Dublin house a month previously.

The Sunday World reported that a criminal gang working the area found two envelopes stuffed with €500 notes during a raid on the al-Harati’s family home, October 6.

The article, apparently relying on police sources, stated that al-Harati, who has been a Dublin resident employed as an Arabic teacher for 20 years, claimed, when contacted by police, that the stolen cash was “given to him by an American intelligence agency.”

The article continued, “Astonished officers made contact with Mahdi al-Harati who told them that he had travelled to France, the United States and Qatar the previous month and that representatives of an American intelligence agency had given him a significant amount of money to help in the efforts to defeat Gaddafi. He said he left two envelopes with his wife in case he was killed and took the rest of the cash with him when he went back to Libya.”

When Abdallah’s brother was shot and paralysed from the waist down, he was flown back to Britain to get NHS treatment. But the UK’s aid for the rebels went far beyond the ‘health tourism’ we’ve all come to expect in Soft Touch Britain.

Middle Eastern Eye blew the whistle on what really happened on 25th May 2017, in a major investigation entitled ‘Sorted’ by MI5: How UK government sent British-Libyans to fight Gadaffi. This included the following revelations:

“One British citizen with a Libyan background who was placed on a control order – effectively house arrest – because of fears that he would join militant groups in Iraq said he was “shocked” that he was able to travel to Libya in 2011 shortly after his control order was lifted.

“‘I was allowed to go, no questions asked,’ said the source, who wished to remain anonymous.

“He said he had met several other British-Libyans in London who also had control orders lifted in 2011 as the war against Gaddafi intensified, with the UK, France and the US carrying out air strikes and deploying special forces soldiers in support of the rebels.

“‘They didn’t have passports, they were looking for fakes or a way to smuggle themselves across,’ said the source.

“But within days of their control orders being lifted, British authorities returned their passports, he said.

“‘These were old school LIFG guys, they [the British authorities] knew what they were doing,’ he said, referring to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an anti-Gaddafi Islamist militant group formed in 1990 by Libyan veterans of the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

“Belal Younis, another British citizen who went to Libya, described how he was stopped under ‘Schedule 7’ counter-terrorism powers on his return to the UK after a visit to the country in early 2011. Schedule 7 allows police and immigration officials to detain and question any person passing through border controls at ports and airports to determine whether they are involved in terrorism.He said he was subsequently asked by an intelligence officer from MI5, the UK’s domestic security agency: “Are you willing to go into battle?

“‘While I took time to find an answer he turned and told me the British government have no problem with people fighting against Gaddafi,’ he told MEE.

As he was travelling back to Libya in May 2011 he was approached by two counter-terrorism police officers in the departure lounge who told him that if he was going to fight he would be committing a crime.

But after providing them with the name and phone number of the MI5 officer he had spoken to previously, and following a quick phone call to him, he was waved through.

“As he waited to board the plane, he said the same MI5 officer called him to tell him that he had ‘sorted it out’.”

The Manchester bombing is a terrible and classic example of ‘blow back’. Sadly, it will not be the last.

Police stations across Spain have been put on alert after a man wielding a knife and shouting in Arabic was shot dead as he entered a police station at Cornellà de Llobregat, south of Barcelona.

The 29-year-old man is of Algerian origins, according to newspaper El Pais.

On Twitter, the police explained: “A man armed with a knife has accessed the police station in Cornella this morning with the aim of attacking officers.

 “He has been taken out. The incident happened just before 6am this morning.”

An officer at the reception of the police station is said to have pulled the trigger on the man.

Emergency services arrived at the scene but could not to save the attacker, who died shortly after his attempted attack.

Christian political philosophy has two masters and four basic principles. Hippo and Aquino claim its two masters: Ss. Augustine and Thomas. They, in turn, can lay claim to teaching four basic Christian principles of politics and political rule:

• First, politics and political rule is natural and good.
• Second, sin vitiates our nature and therefore makes politics and political rule difficult.
• Third, the purpose of politics and political rule is to make human beings better.
• Fourth, politics and political rule is a limited means.

Five hundred years ago, political thinking began abandoning the Third Principle, viz., that politics is supposed to make human beings better. Modern politics and political philosophers now abandon most, if not all, of these principles. Christians should not. Or if they do, Christians should at least be aware that they are rejecting the wisdom of Augustine and Thomas. Ideally, they would know why they reject the basic principles of Christian political philosophy. But let me simply clarify that these four basic principles are foundational aspects of a coherent, consistent, continuous body of political-philosophical thought.

The aforementioned basic principles are contained primarily in two large texts: Augustine’s City of God and Thomas’s Summa Theologiae—at least its so-called “Treatise on Law,” ST I-II qq. 90-108. Augustine writes primarily for Rome’s public men, Christian and pagan, who are versed in the philosophers of Late Antiquity. Thomas clarifies his teaching.

If Augustine needs clarifying, it is because he paints an unflattering picture of political history. His rhetorical purpose is to show that Christian political wisdom has something new and true to teach the world, and to completely undermine the statesmen, philosophers, and historians who point to a simpler golden age where Roman mores were uncorrupted. Political history is painted with the broad brush of the “City of Man” and the “earthly city.” These names even mis-specify human politics too narrowly: while Adam and Eve are its revolutionary liberators and Cain is its founding father, Satan is its influential political theorist. The ancient empires worship various fallen angels. Rome, consecrated to them by Numa Pompilius, is no exception. Human politics is and always will be a beachhead for the City of Hell, and a communion of sinners that is a dark counterfeit of the communion of saints.

Since he paints the Second Principle, viz., that sin vitiates human nature and makes politics difficult, so vividly, Augustine is often said to reject the First Principle, viz., that politics is natural and good. Three proof-texts often surface to demonstrate that Augustine thinks politics properly speaking—and not just politics ‘as we know it’—is the result of sin and evil. Two are in Book 4: Augustine approves of the pirate who dares to tell Alexander, ‘justice removed, what is a kingdom but a large band of robbers’; and Augustine says if men were peaceful and just, ‘there would be as many kingdoms among nations as houses in a large city.’ The supposed linchpin, often cited, is in Book 19, where God gives Adam dominion only over the lower animals.

The first two proof-texts are easily dealt with. First, by insisting that kingdoms require real justice, Augustine is preparing his critique of Scipio’s definition of the commonwealth in Cicero’s Republic, which requires only an agreement vis-à-vis what is just. Augustine will argue that Christians can pierce the veils of glory and lust for power, see clearly what is truly just, and rule commonwealths where true justice is loved. In ST I-II q. 90, Thomas will later call this, following Aristotle’s direction—but daring to tread where Aristotle does not ultimately go—the ‘common good’ towards which our natural reason can guide the lawmaker. Politics is natural in the sense that the virtues are natural. Second, Augustine does not say that every household would be a kingdom, but that a sinless world would not have great empires but thousands of small kingdoms. This is reaffirmed in On the Free Choice of the Will where Augustine argues that, were all men just and peaceful, they could trust one another to choose their own leaders. Rulers should make human beings better so that they are worthy of democracy, like the Israelites who, as Thomas reminds us in ST I-II q.105, democratically chose the seventy-two elders ‘from among the people’ in the ‘mixed regime’ of Moses.

In ST I-II q. 96, Thomas clarifies that being ‘subject to law,’ can mean being subject to coercion or ruled by a higher law. We might understand the ‘dominion’ Augustine discusses in The City of God, Book 19, in this light. God does not intend anyone to be subject to coercive domination, since he intends everyone to be subject to the higher law. Neither Augustine nor Thomas think that coercive rule in the usual sense of the master-slave relationship is natural, although rational political rule is.

Like Augustine, Thomas is well aware that human beings universally suffer the effects of sin, and are born with concupiscible and irascible aspects. There may be entire societies that are disordered, Thomas concedes in ST I-II q. 94, like the Gauls whom Caesar claimed approved of theft. But this is not what Thomas means by nature, or the natural law that he writes in ST I-II q. 90 that is inextinguishable in us.

Both the First and the Second Principle are now clearer. In a world of perfect, ‘unfallen’ human beings, government would be rationally oriented towards the common good. The sinless would have the natural law in their hearts. Sin is the source of all political problems.

Now let us turn to what Thomas says the purpose of law is in ST I-II q. 92, viz., ‘to make men good.’ This is the promise that Augustine sees in the Christian statesman; Book 11 underlines the difference between the rational values of things and their use-value. The Christian statesman is able to see that the slave has an inestimably higher value in the eyes of God—in the rational order of the cosmos—than a jewel, even if the jewel has a higher price, use-value, and is coveted more than the slave. To become good, for Augustine, is to be converted away from the lust for mastery and the desire for glory—which can only inspire counterfeit virtues—and to see things as they really are. Pride makes us objectify persons and objects according to our own purposes for them; humility allows us to see things as they really are in their nature, according to God’s purpose. Human nature is such that God created the race through a single individual, Augustine argues in Book 12, so it would be obvious that we are made to live in gregarious concord with one another, not as slaves to our lust. To the extent that the City of God is ascendant in human affairs, the cities of the world will be ruled by the one source of lasting peace.

Of course, the wounds of sin cannot be healed completely by politics. We also learn in Book 11 that the two cities will be admixed forever in this present world. Thomas turns to Augustine’s On the Free Choice of the Will to puts a sharper point on the limits of political rule in ST I-II q. 96, where he proposes that human beings can only be led gradually to virtue. The law can lead human beings to every virtue, but cannot ordain all the acts of the virtues. This is not simply for practical reasons, either; one can be a tyrant not only by commanding one’s subjects do to evil, but by overstepping the limits of one’s authority. Human law, Thomas argues in ST I-II q. 98, is ordered towards making human beings better so that there can be temporal peace. To imagine that laws can lead human beings to the end of their eternal happiness is to attempt to do with coercive power what can only be done with grace. As Thomas remarks, importantly, on another occasion:

Man is not ordained to the body politic, according to all that he is and has; and so it does not follow that every action of his acquires merit or demerit in relation to the body politic. But all that man is, and can, and has, must be referred to God: and therefore every action of man, whether good or bad, acquires merit or demerit in the sight of God, as far as the action itself is concerned. (ST I-IIae, q.21 a.3 ad3)

Both the Third and Fourth Principles are now clearer. A politics of the common good consists in making each member of the political community more virtuous. However, both the means by which and the ends for which the political ruler can promote the common good are limited.

Christian political philosophy is more focused on the common good than the kind of regimes that should be devised; thus, Thomas wrote a commentary on the first three books of Aristotle’s Politics but not the last five. Two important exceptions come to mind. First, the theology of human nature and the Fall provide Augustine and Thomas additional arguments against slave-mastery as a legitimate mode of political rule, beyond any of those found in Aristotle. Second, Augustine and Thomas seem to think that the more the common good is achieved, the more fitted citizens will be for ruling and being ruled in turn democratically, in the context of a mixed regime with aristocratic and kingly elements.

How we think about politics today is complicated by the rush to consider the proper spheres of Church and family, as the exigencies of our time require. The four basic principles simplify the Christian political philosophy of the proper sphere of the “state,” or the temporal power, so that we neither exaggerate nor denigrate the sphere in which it ought to operate.

Liberal thought, now in its second ascendancy, is originally premised on a rejection of the Third Principle, viz. that politics ought to make men better. Liberals suspect that this premise leads to irreconcilable conflicts, and makes violence inevitable. Christians traditionally suspect the opposite: if we do not aspire together to our better natures, we allow men to be wolves.

Originally posted at: The Josias

This church is a hidden treasure of history in Tower Hamlets, East London.

The only Anglo-Saxon rood cross in London is kept inside, a stone panel depicting the crucifixion.

From Saxon to Norman to the Knights Templars and the Kights Hospitallers – it’s had an interesting history for a small church.

Certainly one of the most interesting and culturally valuable buildings in the borough of Tower Hamlets and well worth a visit by locals and tourists alike.