Now this is what WE call MUSIC!

The stirring strains of Carl Orff’s O Fortuna from Carmina Burana, reworked in honour of the Knights Templars – the greatest military order in the entire history of Christendom!

If you’ve never heard it, listen! If you know it, you’ll listen again. Either way – have a good day!

The Red Pill is a classic 2016 documentary film by Cassie Jaye exploring the men’s rights movement.

The Red Pill chronicles Jaye’s journey beginning as a skeptical feminist investigating what she believes to be a hate movement. She goes on to discover that the movement is different from what she expected and begins to question her own views on gender, power, and privilege. The film discusses numerous issues facing men and boys such as male suicide rates, workplace fatalities and high-risk jobs, false allegations of rape, military conscription, lack of services for male victims of domestic violence and rape, higher rates of violent victimization, issues concerning divorce and child custody, disparity in criminal sentencing, disproportionate funding and research on men’s health issues, educational inequality, and men’s lack of reproductive rights.

It includes numerous interviews with men’s rights activists and those supportive of the movement, most notably Paul Elam, founder of A Voice for Men; Harry Crouch, president of the National Coalition for Men; Warren Farrell, author of The Myth of Male Power; and Erin Pizzey, who started the first domestic violence shelter in the modern world. It also includes interviews with feminists critical of the movement, such as Ms. magazine executive editor Katherine Spillar, and sociologist Michael Kimmel. It also contains excerpts from Jaye’s video diary.

Let’s get one thing straight: As traditionalist supporters of the family (one man, one woman, married, their children) we have ABSOLUTELY no time for the MGTOW inadequates and woman-haters. But red pills are certainly needed for many young men. Let’s hope plenty get this one. They sure need it, so pass it on!

Once the treasure of the West, the university system­ largely founded by Christians, are hotbeds of deranged left-wing college professors and radical student-activists and cold house for Christians, Conservatives and every other “oppressor class.”

The deliberate mind poisoning of our youth is an issue the Templars have been addressing for several years now, but one aspect of the university system we have not touched on as much as we should is the corporatization of college and the massive debts passed on to the taxpayer.

The Times:

The first thing you need to understand . . . no, understand isn’t the right word, there is not enough logic here to allow understanding . . . the first thing you need to know is that when the government spends about £14 billion this year on loans to students, government debt rises by £14 billion but government borrowing does not. That £14 billion does not count against the deficit. That’s because the national accounts treat student loans as financial transactions. A loan is issued. It is due to be paid back in the future. There is no impact on the deficit unless and until the borrower fails to pay back.

But wait a minute. The student loan system is not devised even on the basis that all these loans will be paid back. The whole point of the system is that if you don’t earn very much, you won’t pay back very much. It is designed that way for a reason: it helps to ensure that people are not put off attending university. They don’t bear the risk of having to make large repayments from small amounts of earnings. Perhaps 80 per cent of graduates will not repay in full, given existing rules. Jo Johnson, minister for higher education until the recent reshuffle, thinks that under present rules between 40 per cent and 45 per cent of the value of loans will not be repaid.

This is, in fact, reflected in the Department for Education’s own accounts, which are likely this year to write off more than £6 billion of the loans that it makes to students. It is, nevertheless, not reflected at all in government borrowing figures.

With the humanity departments swelling, many of the degrees handed out at our modern universities are not worth the paper they are written on. Standards have been reduced to ensure more people have access to University and hence: student loans! Student loans which are generously thrown at them by Banks preying on the nativity of teenagers eager for freedom from parental rule. In the UK, if a student fail to return the loan, the Government swoops in to rescue the in-debtor by paying off the loan with taxpayers’ money.

Canadian students owe $29Bn to the Government for student loans. In March of 2018, the Canadian Government writ off $200m in student loans.

CBC:

Recently released spending documents show the government won't collect $203.5 million in debts from 34,240 students

It is the third time in the last four years that the government has had to write off outstanding student loans even as officials make concerted efforts to round up more money from borrowers.

The government annually has to write off some of the $19 billion owing in student loans for a number of reasons: a debtor may file for bankruptcy, the debt itself passes a six-year legal limit on collection, or the debtor can't be found.

The Liberals have looked to make it easier for graduates to pay off their loans — and for the government to collect the cash — by increasing the minimum annual income they have to earn before they are required to make debt payments.

And for our American brothers and sisters, the stats are fightening…

• $1.48 trillion in total U.S. student loan debt
• 2 million Americans with student loan debt
• Student loan delinquency rate of 11.2% (90+ days delinquent or in default)
• Average monthly student loan payment (for borrower aged 20 to 30 years): $351
• Median monthly student loan payment (for borrower aged 20 to 30 years): $203

With gender theory and sociology graduates flipping burgers and washing cars to pay off their debtors, eventually the Government will step in to clear the debt. In other words, we, the taxpayers, will have to pay for the poor decisions of liberals that wanted to extend the adolescence and study useless subjects.

Who could have guessed that semesters studying the 'Sociology of Frankenstein' at the university of Vermont, or 'Understanding the Obama's' at Pennsylvania University would be such a waste of time and money?  

YouTube commentator has covered this issue extensively and we encourage our members and readers to watch his videos detailing the liberal takeover of colleges and the deliberate economic burdening of our sons and daughters:

The reality that modernity is and that it also causes crises, severe ones, in the cultural and civilizational fabric dawned on perceptive observers at the turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.  Joseph de Maistre in the Francophone world and Edmund Burke in Anglophone offer themselves as early outstanding analysts of emergent modernity.  Their work constitutes the bedrock of a steady tradition of anti-modern criticism that has, somewhat paradoxically, accompanied modernity for more than two centuries, becoming ever more acute as modernity increased in its perniciousness. 

The first half of the Twentieth Century produced a number of outstanding commentators in this vein – not least that Colossus Oswald Spengler, but also René Guénon, Julius Evola, José Ortega, Simone Weil, Paul Valéry, and Eric Voegelin, to name but a few.  And that is to count only the essayists.  Poets and novelists add themselves to the tally.  Another important name that wants a place in the list belongs to Nicolas Berdyaev (1874 – 1948), whose curriculum vitae heightens the plausibility of his critique.  Born of the minor aristocracy, Berdyaev in his youth associated himself with Marxism and the Bolsheviks even to the extent of supporting the October Revolution. 

The regime permitted Berdyaev to teach and to publish, but the brutality of Lenin’s new order swiftly alienated the philosopher, who began to criticize the state and its actions from a specifically Christian point of view.  At one point the police arrested Berdyaev but then released him.  Berdyaev continued his criticism until finally Lenin exiled him in 1922.  He went first to Berlin, but the chaos of the early Weimar years made it impossible for him to work.  in 1924 he traded Berlin for Paris where he remained.  Berdyaev lived by writing and lecturing.  His authorship offers itself both as an intrinsically useful assessment of the modern deformation and as a complement to the work of those other, mainly Western European writers named above.  Berdyaev possessed a perspective all his own.

Homo Modernus: Sooper-Dooper Self-Confident; Believes in Nothing but Himself

Berdyaev’s Fate of Man in the Modern World appeared in 1935.  In it Berdyaev returns to his recurrent thesis that in the Twentieth Century the crisis of modernity has become a runaway catastrophe.  In Chapter I, “A Judgment on History – the War,” Berdyaev writes, “More keenly than ever I feel that night and shadow are descending on the world, just as was the case at the beginning of the Middle Ages, before the medieval Renaissance.”  Many keen-sighted people recognize the situation, Berdyaev remarks, but few of them have grasped its essence.  “In reality what is happening is something even deeper… a judgment upon not one epoch in history, but upon history itself.”  The times, Berdyaev asserts, choosing his key term with special care, qualify as “apocalyptic.” 

This unveiling corresponds not merely to “a revelation of the end of the world”; rather it corresponds to “a revelation of the inner events of history, of the internal judgment upon history itself.”  Because “man’s existence in this world is historical,” the disintegration of history involves the disintegration both of man and culture.  “The things man has planned do not come to pass, and the true significance of what takes place escapes man’s comprehension.”  Berdyaev means modern man – the deluded being who, having killed off God, took on the godlike role, quite as Ludwig Feuerbach had urged him to do, assuming that his will and his creativity could conjure a new and perfected world better than the one created by God.  Such a man, enamored of his own ego, thought to appropriate the very course of history and to alter its direction according to his agenda.  History, however, is cleverer than man.

In Berdyaev’s interpretation, modernity thinks that it can reverse Adam’s fall and reestablish paradise, but it only blindly and dumbly reenacts that fall.  It is a case of titanic hubris and of equally titanic nemesis.  “The world war and the revolutionary processes which have followed it have a metaphysical significance for the fate of man.” 

The war put on display, bloodily and destructive, the demonic inhumanity that had long simmered under the veneer of civilization; it showed that the modern utopian conceit expressed a fundamental nihilism which, discovering that it could not create on a godlike level, turned its fury on creation, especially the human portion of that creation, and sought its annihilation.  “The war revealed the personality of our civilization,” Berdyaev writes; “it cheapened life, it taught man to take no thought for human life and personality, to consider them as means and instruments in the hands of the fatality of history.” 

That term personality operates centrally in Berdyaev’s Christian anthropology.  When men think of history as a process that they can control, they make war on the person, as such – the person validated by the words and deeds of Christ, in whom alone the human creature can find its dignity.

Berdyaev observes how “it is noteworthy that at a time when every religious sanction of authority has vanished, we live in a very authoritarian epoch.”  The point strikes Berdyaev as sufficiently important that he repeats it in variorum a few lines later: “The tragedy of the situation lies in the fact that great masses of humanity have awakened and come into power at the moment of a falling away from Christianity and the loss of all religious beliefs.

An Epiphenomenon of Sex

In the middle chapters of The Fate of Man, Berdyaev catalogues the myriad species of nihilistic deformation by which modernity makes itself evident.  In Chapter II, “Dehumanization,” Berdyaev characterizes the modern scene as dissolving the concrete in the abstract.  The ideological regimes – and Berdyaev includes the British Empire and North America in the category of ideological regimes – dictate according to a convenient and pallid theory of man rather than to the actual man, the person.  Indeed the person looms up before the eyes of that regime as a terror and an obstacle.  The demand for conformity and the strict policing of the populus to insure conformity stem from the perception, which partakes in truth, that the person naturally opposes himself to the state and that the person, metaphysically and theologically speaking, enjoys priority over the state.  Modern man espouses Friedrich Nietzsche’s dream of the superman (the commonest theme of every Hollywood summer blockbuster of the last twenty years).  Far from transcending himself in any benevolent way, the would-be superman drastically lowers himself.  “A bestial cruelty toward man is characteristic of our age,” Berdyaev writes, “and this is more astonishing since it is displayed at the very peak of human refinement, where modern conceptions of sympathy, it would seem, have made impossible the old, barbaric forms of cruelty.”  Berdyaev finds this tendency everywhere replicated.  “The process of dehumanization is especially notable in modern literature.”  In the novels of Marcel Proust and André Gide, for example, “man is decomposed… a whole image no longer exists.”  In Malraux and Lawrence man sinks down to his criminal passions or becomes an epiphenomenon of sex.

In Chapter III, “New Forces in the World’s Life,” Berdyaev surveys politics and economics, which in the modern dispensation are inextricably linked.  Modern people find a substitute for the divine presence in what they call democracy.  With its Greek origin, the word carries the luster of authority, but as Berdyaev sees things, democracy merely puts a fancy label on collectivization, which entangles itself with nationalism and such phenomena as racism, in the Nazi case, and classism, in the Communist one.  Berdyaev’s assessment of these aspects of modernity runs strongly in parallel with Ortega’s in The Revolt of the Masses (1930).  Both take note of the increase of populations: The vast number of people and their crowding into urban spaces belong characteristically to everything modern. 

The throng moreover tends to average itself out towards the lowest common denominator.  “Man has always been overwhelmed by large numbers; the talented by the mass of mediocre, quality by quantity.”  The mass requires its own mobilization or organization and the authoritarian state provides the only instrument capable of those programs.  “We are witnessing a reversion to the herd instinct, but in new, civilized and technical forms.”  The idea of economics, which began in the private management of the household, becomes another depersonalizing regime – one that, in Berdyaev’s view combines the worst features of Nineteenth Century capitalism and Twentieth Century socialism, as inspired by Marx.  “Nationalism,” Berdyaev writes, “means the dehumanization and liberalization of human societies.”  In Hitler’s Reich, the authoritarian state bases itself on a reductive, entirely non-spiritual notion of race; in the Soviet Union, the regime bases itself on an equally reductive and non-spiritual notion of class.

Chapter IV, “Culture and Christianity,” finds Berdyaev bringing his themes together and probing to the deepest level of the catastrophe that he has identified.  He begins with a definition of culture.  His usage differs from the contemporary abusive and ubiquitous leftwing employment of the same term.  The leftwing regime celebrates as culture only the vulgar preoccupations of the masses, but Berdyaev insists on culture as High Culture, which began again after the death of Classical civilization in the Florentine Renaissance.  Culture qua High Culture is always “aristocratic in principle,” but “we live in an epoch of plebeian revolt against every aristocratic element in culture.”  Concerning the Florentine Renaissance, Berdyaev remarks that “it developed because of leisure, the possibility of expressing creative plenitude, it presupposed inequality.” 

The Renaissance made way, that is, for the person in the highest degree to develop and put in practice his talents while insulating him from the demands of the vulgar.  In the modern regime, the state makes demands on behalf of the masses, “but this changes culture into something so different as to need a new name,” Berdyaev writes, and he suggests “civilization” as that new name.  Astute readers will recognize a parallelism with Spengler, with whose work Berdyaev was familiar.  Culture for Spengler is the vital and creative stage; civilization the moribund and ossified stage of any nation.  Although he was writing more than eight decades ago, Berdyaev’s words apply themselves almost automatically to movies, television, the Internet, and institutions such as the colleges and universities today: “In a liberal democracy the cultural elite depends on capital and the vulgar tastes of the crowd; in an authoritarian or a communist democracy it depends upon the dictated world-view, an authority which pretends to organize the spirit.” 

The masses cannot rise to the level of High Culture, but the elites are perfectly capable of pandering to the masses – and indeed in 2018 they gleefully do so, notwithstanding that in betraying themselves they exacerbate the catastrophe by driving the society even further into the depths of its degradation.  The situation is made worse by the fact that the modern regime maintains implacable hostility to religion.  As Berdyaev reminds his readers, in pre-modern societies such as those of Athens and Florence “religion was the meeting-place of the masses with the aristocratic cultural class.”  Berdyaev insists that “only religion is capable of making such a combination: Neither philosophy nor science, nor enlightenment, neither art nor literature can do this.”

In his first chapter, Berdyaev invoked the Renaissance as the beginning of the current phase of the West and he repeated his notion that first appears in Meaning of the Creative Act (1916) that in the Twentieth Century the Renaissance was coming to its end.  Berdyaev uses the word Renaissance almost as a synonym for humanist culture since what today calls itself humanism has its origin in the Fourteenth Century and the revival of Classical literature and art.  In Chapter IV, Berdyaev returns to the theme.  He writes, “The end of the Renaissance is approaching,” but so too then is the end of humanist culture approaching.  This will be so because humanist culture, insofar as it set man rather than God at the center of the cosmos contained the seeds of its own deformation and destruction. Humanism became liberalism. 

When it did it closed any last aperture on transcendence.  The creative person’s response to the genuine “super-personal ideal” transformed itself at the same time into acquiescence in a “dictated world-view [that] paralyses creative conscience.”   Whereas, in Berdyaev’s words, “creative service is voluntary,” by contrast “a dictatorship over the spirit corrupts the culturally creative.”  Weakening itself by purging itself of its Christian-transcendent element, humanism gradually rendered itself incapable of resisting “the technicizing of life.”  Humanism, as in the colleges and universities of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, became another department in the universal bureaucracy and submitted to the state’s demand of disseminating the state’s self-justifying propaganda.

Again in his first chapter, Berdyaev declared his present moment a judgment on history.  He returns to that thesis too in Chapter IV, but introduces a complication: “We are witnessing a judgment not on history alone, but upon Christianity in history, upon Christian humanity,” necessarily because “Christianity in history has been not only the revelation of God, but also the work of man,” and “the purity of revelation has often been sullied by the human element, the human consciousness through which it has been filtered.”  Berdyaev devotes a paragraph to listing the human deformation of Christianity.  In a preliminary conclusion, he states: “The judgment on Christianity is a judgment upon the false theophanies, the false sanctification of the natural and the historical.”  What meaning attaches itself to Berdyaev’s phrase, “false theophanies”?  These would be the heresies that take some tiny part of Christian revelation and blow it up until it overtakes the whole and relinquishes and context. 

In a secular order, the heresies become the ideologies.  It would be possible to supply specific references that Berdyaev, who probably assumes that his readers are familiar with them, omits.  Consider, for example, those expressions of the late Renaissance, the utopias.  There is the original Utopia of Thomas More; there are the technical utopias of Sir Francis Bacon and Tomasso Campanella.  Then there are the radical Protestant sects, such as the Anabaptist movement, which anticipate the Revolution in France.  There is the Cartesian reduction of consciousness and the absurd theory of the “Blank Slate.”  (Everyone can compile his own long list.)  Berdyaev writes:

The judgment upon Christianity is going on in all phases of human life and culture.  It is a judgment upon false monism and false dualism, upon extreme immanentism, upon the deification of human frailties and the degradation of human dignity.  The world crisis is a judgment both from above and from beneath.  The tragic conflict between Christianity and history is nothing new – it is eternal and in the process each judges the other.  History’s judgment upon Christianity is its revelation of Christianity’s failures in history…  But on the other hand this defeat of Christianity turns into a judgment upon history.  The failure of Christianity is the failure of history as well.  This is more clearly evident now, than ever before.

In one of his epigrammatic utterances, Berdyaev summarizes his argument: “The world tried to affirm man as against Christianity and arrived at the negation of man himself.”  A paragraph or two later Berdyaev follows up one epigram with another: “The world is again in the grip of the polydemonism from which Christianity once rescued it.”  The choice, Berdyaev argues, lies between continuing the descent into “technicized chaos in which only the most terrible forms of idolatry can live” and “a new Christian piety.”  One can imagine an urbane skeptic of 2018 responding to Berdyaev’s vocabulary with eyebrow-arching disdain.  Demons, idolatry, and salvation through a divine redeemer: Who believes in such myths and nonsense?  One only needs to pay attention, painful though it is, to the daily news. 

Consider the comedienne who has herself photographed holding in simulacrum the severed head of a duly elected President of the United States.  Consider those summertime movies aimed at adolescents that specialize in extreme sadomasochistic violence, for which there is a paying appetite worth hundreds of millions each time.  Consider that liberals are willing to come to the defense of Mexican gangsters with hideous full-body tattoos who like their Aztec ancestors routinely murder people by cutting their hearts out.  Consider the pornography and abortion industries.  Would any non-theological vocabulary properly account for such phenomena?  The answer is, only a theological vocabulary can properly account for them.  When the social milieu begins to resemble the setting of a short story by Arthur Machen or H. P. Lovecraft, it is high time to revive the old wordbook.

In 1935 – and well before 1935 – Berdyaev knew what few people know today: That the world had come to an end.  Western Civilization destroyed itself in the “Great War” of 1914 to 1918 and it has never put itself back together.  Instead, its dazed survivors adapted themselves to a Waste Land and as they adapted their character became more and more demonic.  The name for adapting oneself to live in Grendel’s marsh by pretending that it is utopia is ideology.  The final phase of modernity, through which one is apparently condemned to live, consists in a global project to deny reality.  Thus a man might mutilate himself, drink dosages of the female hormone, and declare himself a woman.  The existing regime not only affirms his lie, but coerces others to validate and participate in that same lie. 

The liberalization of the Christian churches also belongs to Berdyaev’s triumph of the demons.  When the congregations decide to be on the side of the history that they think they can co-opt, they leave the domain of Christianity and ally themselves with the ideologues.  This has happened even to the Catholic Church at its highest level in a pope who is indistinguishable from a modern liberal conformist.  Berdyaev preferred Greek Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism precisely because Orthodoxy organizes itself from the ground up rather than from the top down; it has proven itself, he thought, better able to resist history – the human plan foredoomed to its failure – than the colossally bureaucratic Church of Rome. 

Berdyaev’s attitude in 1935 turned in the direction of hope: “The hour has struck,” he wrote, “when, after terrible struggle, after an unprecedented de-Christianization of the world and its passage through all the results of that process, Christianity will be revealed in its pure form.”  That hour seems to have prolonged itself beyond Berdyaev’s hopeful near-horizon, but that in no way invalidates his expectation.  Faith understands that in this world its hope is necessarily deferred, but that deferral works in time and therefore contains the possibility of its realization.

Originally published at: Orthosphere

The anti-Christian left have already imposed massive social revolution on “the West”. They are aiming to finish the process off by ousting President Trump and using the scattered resistance that they believe will be unable to prevent them as an excuse to disarm every patriot in the USA.

We have to learn how these evil creatures work, because only then do we begin to have a hop of stopping them. A great place to start is with the handbook which the left have used so effectively:

“Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals” was written by community organizer Saul Alinsky in 1971. It has become the de facto progressive manifesto for effecting political change.

Opening: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.

Hillary Clinton met with Saul Alinsky several times in 1968 while she was writing her college thesis on his community organization theories. Barack Obama’s education was also greatly influenced by Alinsky and his theories.

What is The Truth About Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – and how does it work?

Police in Yorkshire have FINALLY acted to try to stamp out the ‘grooming’ plague in yet another town. Thirty men and one woman have been charged with sexually exploiting five schoolgirls in Huddersfield over a seven year period.

Police have revealed today the staggering number of suspects will appear in court next month.

The 30 men and one woman, who are mostly from Huddersfield, Yorkshire, are accused of rape, trafficking and sexual exploitation.

The 30 men and one woman will appear at Kirklees Magistrates Court on 5 and 6 September 2018.

Police say the offences relate to the treatment of five young girls between the years of 2005 and 2012.

There is no sign of the police referring themselves for investigation into all the times when they accused parents who complained of ‘racism’, or claimed they could do nothing because the child victims “gave their consent”. All that will – yet again – be brushed under the carpet.

The alleged victims, who are now adults, were between the ages of 12 and 18 at the time of the abuse and lived in the Huddersfield area.

Twelve other men, who cannot be named for legal reasons, have also been charged with numerous offences in connection with the same investigation into non-recent child sexual exploitation.

Here is the list that the police have released:

• Banaras Hussain aged 37, of Shipley, is charged with one count of rape of a female over 16
• Banaris Hussain, aged 35, of Huddersfield, is charged with one count of rape of a girl aged 13 – 15
• Mohammed Suhail Arif, aged 30, of Huddersfield, is charged with rape of girl aged 13-15
• Iftikar Ali, aged 37, of Huddersfield, is charged with attempted rape of girl aged 13-15 and three counts of rape of a girl aged 13-15
• Mohammed Sajjad, aged 31, of Huddersfield, is charged with four counts of rape of a female age 13-15, one rape of a girl under 13 and facilitating the commission of a child sex offence
• Fehreen Rafiq, aged 38, of Huddersfield, she is charged with two counts of facilitating the commission of a child sex offence
• Umar Zaman, aged 30, of Huddersfield, is charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15
• Basharat Hussain, aged 31, of Huddersfield, is charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15
• Amin Ali Choli, aged 36, of Huddersfield, is charged with two counts of rape of a female over 16-years-old
• Shaqeel Hussain, aged 35, of Dewsbury, is charged with rape of a female aged 13-15 and two counts of trafficking
• Mubasher Hussain, aged 35, of Huddersfield, is charged with rape of a female aged 13-15 and sexual assault. Abdul Majid, aged 34, of Huddersfield
• is charged with two counts of rape of female aged 13-15
• Mohammed Dogar, aged 35, of Huddersfield, is charged with two counts of facilitating the commission of child sex offence
• Usman Ali, aged 32, of Huddersfield, is charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15
• Mohammed Waqas Anwar, aged 29, of Huddersfield, is charged with five counts of rape of a female aged 13-15
• Gul Riaz, aged 42, of Huddersfield, is charged with rape of a female aged 13-15
• Mohammed Akram, aged 41, of Huddersfield, is charged with two counts of trafficking with a view to sexual exploitation of a female and rape of a female aged 14-15
• Manzoor Akhtar, aged 29, of Huddersfield, is charged with trafficking and three counts of rape of a female aged 13-15
• Samuel Fikru, aged 30, of Camden, has been charged with two counts of rape of female aged 13-15

In the wake of this morning’s terror attack in Westminster, it has emerged that the security services are conducting a staggering 676 ‘live’ terrorism investigations and have foiled 13 plots over the past 18 months alone.

Evidence of the scale of the threat to the UK came as Theresa May urged the public to be ‘vigilant’ and defy the extremists.

In a statement after the suspected terror attack at Westminster, when a man in a Ford Fiesta mowed down cyclists before crashing into barriers around Parliament, the Prime Minister said the incident was’shocking’.

‘The threat to the United Kingdom from terrorism remains severe. I would urge the public to remain vigilant – but also to come together and carry on as normal, just as they did after the sickening attacks in Manchester and London last year,’ she said.

 

The car was stopped in its tracks by a new security barrier designed to stop a lorry attack of the sort used in Nice or Berlin.

Cyclists abandoned their bikes after the collision with one being treated for injuries in the middle of the road as terror came to London’s streets again

The PM’s spokesman said that over the past 18 months 17 terrorist plots had been foiled. There are 676 live terrorism investigations in progress, he said. The previous figure given in March was that there were ‘over 500’.

Part of the reason for the increase is undoubtedly the continued return ‘home’ of ISIS fighters defeated by Syrian, Russian and pro-Iranian forces in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the government will clearly take no action to stop this lunacy until more of these monsters kill many more innocent people as fighters from the Libyan conflict did at the Manchester Arena bombing.

It's been 20 years since one bomb robbed 27 families of their loved ones, nearly destroyed a fragile peace and caused revulsion at home and abroad. On August 15th 1998, the RIRA planted a bomb in the small town of Omagh, on a a busy Saturday shopping day. No one has ever been convicted of the atrocity.

29 people, and two unborn twins lost their lives. More than 200 others were injured in the Real IRA attack. It was the deadly terrorist attack in the history of the troubles.

One victim, Aiden Gallagher (21) had been making plans to move to Boston with a friend. Aiden's coat still hangs on the wall of the garage where he worked as a mechanic

DUP leader Arlene Foster said: "The anniversary of the Omagh bombing should serve as a stark reminder of the need to build a future free from violence."

 President Michael D Higgins said: "As President of Ireland, I wish to add my voice to the expressions of solidarity with the people of Omagh and to take the opportunity to acknowledge again the courageous work of the first responders of 20 years ago."

"On this poignant anniversary, all of our thoughts must be with the families of those affected and with all those who continue to work towards a future of peace and reconciliation."  

A memorial service will take place in Co Tyrone today to mark 20 years since the Omagh bombing.

First we had Londonistan’, but now Britain’s second city, Birmingham, is getting an ugly reputation for producing a steady stream of Jihadi terrorists. 

The man who drove his car into pedestrians in Westminster yesterday morning has been named as Salih Khater and it has been revealed that he lived in Birmingham. The Sudanese immigrant – who was “known to detectives” – spent six hours stalking the streets of London before hurtling into 15 cyclists and driving at police officers manning a Westminster security barrier.

Salih Khater, 29, veered off the road careering into pedestrians and cyclists on Parliament Square, after spending the night cruising around in a Ford Fiesta bought two months ago.

Khater, a British citizen born in Sudan, lives in a scruffy flat above an internet cafe in Sparkhill, an area of Birmingham that has housed jihadi cells linked to terrorist plots at home and abroad.

His rented flat is also just ten minutes from the former home of Khalid Masood, whose murderous rampage 17 months ago appears to have inspired Khater’s own carborne attack yesterday.

Birmingham has previously sent large numbers of fighters to join the ISIS invasion of Syria, as well as slamists plotting terror attacks on British soil.

This video gives a glimpse of what is going on – although in typical PC fashion it focuses on a minority sect which the Saudi-financed majority of UK mosques regard as ‘heretical’.

In August 14, 1480, a massacre was perpetrated by Ottoman invaders on a hill just outside the city of Otranto, in southern Italy. Eight hundred of the city’s male inhabitants were taken to a place called the Hill of the Minerva, and, one by one, beheaded in full view of their fellow prisoners. The spot forever after became known as the Hill of the Martyrs.

In medieval warfare, the bloody execution of a city’s population was commonplace, but what happened at Otranto was unique. The victims on the Hill of the Minerva were put to death not because they were political enemies of a conquering army, nor even because they refused to surrender their city. They died because they refused to convert to Islam. The 800 men of Otranto were martyrs, the first victims of what was fully expected to be the relentless conquest of Italy and then all of Christendom by the armies of the Ottoman Empire. Because of their sacrifice, however, the Ottoman invasion was slowed and Rome was spared the same fate that had befallen Constantinople only 27 years before.

Mehmet the Conqueror

On May 29, 1453, the venerable city of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire since its founding by Constantine the Great in the fourth century, fell to an army of 250,000 Ottoman Turks under the personal command of the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmet II. Earning his title, el-Fatih (“the Conqueror”), Mehmet completed the centuries’ old war against the Byzantines and made the once-great Christian city the new capital of his Islamic empire and the launching point for his grand plans of dominion over the West.

Ottoman armies were soon once more on the march, this time headed straight for the heart of Europe. Mehmet laid siege to the city of Belgrade, but his troops were repulsed by the Hungarians. Even so, the campaign ended with the Ottoman occupation of Serbia and a strategically strong position to push into the rest of the Balkans, including Wallachia (Romania) and Moldavia. Mehmet was relentless in his next efforts. Defeated in 1475 by Stephen the Great of Moldavia at the Battle of Vaslui, the Sultan merely waited until the next year to launch yet another army into the field. This time he crushed the Moldavians at the Battle of Valea Alba. More progress would have been made had Mehmet not been checked in the mountains of Wallachia by a foe even more determined and just as merciless: the Wallachian prince and one-time vassal of Mehmet, Vlad III Tepes, known to history as Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Dracula.

Rebuffed for the moment in the Balkans, Mehmet turned to completing a task he had set himself back in 1453. After the fall of Constantinople, Mehmet claimed one other title alongside that of el-Fatih. He called himself Kayser-i Rûm (“Caesar of Rome”) on the basis that he was successor to the throne of the Byzantine Empire and also a descendant of Theodora Kantakouzenos (daughter of the Byzantine Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos) who had been married to Sultan Orhan I (r. 1326-1359). Mehmet announced his intention to invade Italy, capture Rome, and bring together both halves of the Roman Empire. The campaign would also mark the final defeat of the Christian cause in Europe by the conversion of the city of the popes. St. Peter’s Basilica would serve as a stable for the Ottoman cavalry.

The Sultan Aims for Italy

Mehmet halted the ongoing siege of Rhodes—brilliantly defended by the Knights of Rhodes—and ordered large elements of the Turkish army and navy there to set sail for the Italian peninsula. The fleet comprised at least 90 galleys, 15 heavily armed galleasses, and 48 lighter galliots carrying over 18,000 soldiers. Their initial target was the Italian port city of Brindisi, in Puglia (or Apulia), the southeastern corner of the peninsula along the Adriatic Sea. The city was an ideal choice as it offered a large harbor for the ships. The commander of the Ottoman force, Pasha Ahmet, was one of the most formidable of Mehmet’s generals. He intended to capture the port and then advance immediately north toward Rome while Ottoman reinforcements arrived to consolidate the seized territory.

The movement of the fleet was aided considerably by the absence of resistance by the maritime power of Venice. The Venetians and the Ottoman Empire had been fighting each other off and on for dominance in the eastern Mediterranean and Adriatic since 1423. Much to Mehmet’s pleasure, the two powers signed a peace treaty in 1479 that ended hostilities, at least temporarily. The Sultan thus attacked Rhodes and then launched his campaign on Italy without fear of the Christian state of Venice blocking the progress of his armies.

The Adriatic’s weather did not cooperate, however, and the famous winds forced the fleet to land not in Brinidisi but some 50 miles to the south, at Roca, near the city of Otranto. The city is located on the eastern shore of the sub-peninsula of Salento, the small bit of land that juts out from the larger Italian peninsula and that has been described as the “heel” of the Italian “boot.” In 1480, the area was Neapolitan/Aragonese, meaning it was under the control of the united kingdoms of Naples and Aragon. Otranto’s cathedral dated to the late 11th century and had been the scene, ironically, of the enthusiastic blessing of some 12,000 Crusaders under the leadership of Bohemond of Taranto just before they set sail to take part in the First Crusade (1095-1099).

The city’s walls afforded a wonderful view of the Adriatic, but on the morning of July 29, an ominous sight appeared on the horizon: The Ottoman fleet had landed nearby. Thousands of soldiers and sailors began marching toward Otranto, where the garrison of soldiers numbered only around 400. Messengers were sent north to alert the rest of the peninsula of the danger that had arrived from the sea.

The castle had no cannons, and the garrison commander, Count Francesco Largo, was aware of the limited supplies and water. Medieval warfare, even after the emergence of cannons, was predicated on stark and often grim choices on the part of the defenders of any city or castle under siege. The defenders could either hope to hold out (especially if a relief army was on the way), or they could negotiate a surrender. Surrender was an option to be considered as early as possible, for the longer a siege went on the harsher the terms might become. Should a city or castle fight to the last and have its walls breached, staggering violence usually followed as the conquering force pillaged, vented its pent-up frustration, and searched for loot and treasure.

Surrender or Die

For the citizens of Otranto, the siege of Constantinople was still well-known. When that city fell, Ottoman troops were allowed to pillage parts of the city, but the key moment came when they reached the famed church of the Hagia Sophia. After breaking down the church’s bronze gates, the Turkish troops found inside a huge throng of Byzantines who had taken refuge and who were praying that the city might be delivered by some miracle. The Christians were seized and separated according to age and gender. The infants and elderly were brutally murdered; the men—including some of the city’s most prominent senators—were carted off to the slave markets; and the women and girls were taken by soldiers or sent into a life of slavery.

At Otranto, the terms of the Pasha were ostensibly generous. If the town surrendered, the defenders would be permitted to live. Otranto was forfeit. The answer to the Pasha’s demands was firm: The Christians would not surrender. When a second messenger was sent to the walls to repeat the demands, he was met with arrows from the walls. To settle the issue, the leaders of the castle defense climbed to the top of the tower and threw the keys of the city into the sea. When the determined defenders awoke in the morning, however, some of the soldiers had fled by climbing down the walls and running for their lives.

The few hundred inhabitants of Otranto now faced 18,000 fierce Ottomans with barely 50 Neapolitan soldiers. The siege engines and Ottoman cannons brought down a relentless torrent of stones, and waves of Ottoman soldiers crashed against the walls and tried to climb up to get at the frantic defenders. The people of the town boiled oil and water to pour down upon the enemy while others hurled rocks, statues, and furniture.

The struggle went for nearly two harrowing weeks until, in the early morning of August 12, the Ottomans breached a part of the wall with their cannons. A spirited defense was waged amid the rubble of the broken wall, but the people of Otranto were hopelessly overmatched, lacking any training in vicious hand-to-hand combat, and exhausted by the ordeal of the siege.

Slaughter, Sacrilege, and Slavery

Turkish troops slaughtered the stalwart defenders and then rushed through the city killing anyone in their path. They made their way to the cathedral. As in the Hagia Sophia, the invaders found the church filled with people praying with Archbishop Stefano Agricoli, Bishop Stephen Pendinelli, and Count Largo. The Ottomans commanded the archbishop to throw away his crucifix, abjure the Christian faith, and embrace Islam. When he refused, his head was cut off before the weeping congregation. Bishop Pendinelli and Count Largo likewise would not convert and were also put to death, reportedly by being slowly sawed in half. As was the custom, the priests were murdered and the cathedral was stripped of all Christian symbols and turned into a stable for the horses. The Ottomans then gathered up the surviving people of Otranto and took them as captives. Their ultimate fate was in the hands of Pasha Ahmed.

The people of Otranto faced the same end as the Christians of Constantinople. All of the men over the age of 50 were slaughtered; the women and children under the age of 15 were either slain or sent away to Albania to be slaves. According to some contemporary sources, the total number of dead was as high as 12,000, with another 5,000 pressed into slavery. (These numbers are almost certainly an exaggeration as Otranto did not likely have a population that high.) Nevertheless, worse was still to come.

Death before Apostasy

The Pasha Ahmet ordered the men of Otranto, 800 exhausted, beaten, and starved survivors of the battle, to be brought before him. The Pasha informed them that they had one chance to convert to Islam or die. To convince them, he instructed an Italian apostate priest named Giovanni to preach. The former priest called on the men of Otranto to abandon the Christian faith, spurn the Church, and become Muslims. In return, they would be honored by the Pasha and receive many benefits.

One of the men of Otranto, a tailor named Antonio Primaldi (he is also named Antonio Pezzulla in some sources), came forward to speak to the survivors. He called out that he was ready to die for Christ a thousand times. He then added, according to the chronicler Giovanni Laggetto in the Historia della guerra di Otranto del 1480:

MY BROTHERS, UNTIL TODAY WE HAVE FOUGHT IN DEFENSE OF OUR COUNTRY, TO SAVE OUR LIVES, AND FOR OUR LORDS; NOW IT IS TIME THAT WE FIGHT TO SAVE OUR SOULS FOR OUR LORD, SO THAT HAVING DIED ON THE CROSS FOR US, IT IS GOOD THAT WE SHOULD DIE FOR HIM, STANDING FIRM AND CONSTANT IN THE FAITH, AND WITH THIS EARTHLY DEATH WE SHALL WIN ETERNAL LIFE AND THE GLORY OF MARTYRS.

At this, the men of Otranto cried out with one voice that they too were willing to die a thousand times for Christ. The angry Pasha Ahmed pronounced his sentence: death.

The next morning, August 14, the 800 prisoners were bound together with ropes and led out of the still-smoking battleground of Otranto and up the Hill of Minerva. The victims repeated their pledge to be faithful to Christ, and the Ottomans chose the courageous Antonio Primaldo as the first to be executed.

The old tailor gave one final exhortation to his fellow prisoners and knelt before the executioner. The blade fell and decapitated him, but then, as the chronicler Saverio de Marco claimed in the Compendiosa istoria degli ottocento martiri otrantini (“The Brief History of the 800 Martyrs of Otranto”), the headless corpse stood back upright. The body supposedly proved unmovable, so it remained standing for the entire duration of the gruesome executions. Stunned by this apparent miracle, one of the executioners converted on the spot and was immediately killed. The executioners then returned to their horrendous business. The bodies were placed into a mass grave, and the Turks prepared to begin their march up the peninsula toward Rome. Otranto was in ruins, its population gone, its men dead and thrown into a pit, seemingly to be forgotten.

The Second Seige of Otranto

All of Italy was by now in a state of alarm. Pope Sixtus IV was reportedly so concerned for the safety of the Eternal City that he renewed the call first made in 1471 for a crusade against the Turks. Hungary, France, and a number of Italian city-states answered the plea. Not surprisingly, Venice refused, still bound by its treaty. The pope also made plans to evacuate Rome should the Turks arrive near the gates of the city.

Time was now of crucial importance to the safety of the Italian peninsula, and the king of Naples, Ferdinand I, quickly gathered his available forces and charged his son Alfonso, duke of Calabria, with the campaign. The two weeks that were purchased through the sacrifice of the people of Otranto became the key to organizing an effective response to the invasion, for the Neapolitan forces now had the chance to bottle up the Turks in Apulia rather than battling them across Italy.

Toward the end of August, Pasha Ahmed sent 70 ships of the Ottoman fleet to attack the city of Vieste. Turkish troops pushed on and destroyed the small church of Santa Maria di Merino and in early September set fire to the Monastery of San Nicholas di Casole. The monastery’s famed library was reduced to ashes.

In October, the Pasha attacked the cities of Lecce, Taranto, and Brindisi. He left behind a garrison at Otranto of 800 infantry and 500 cavalry. But time and the weather were now against the Turks. Ahmed had lost his chance to strike northwest, and he was finding supplies and food difficult to find in Apulia. He was also aware of the impending advance of the Neapolitan forces. He therefore decided to set sail from Italy before the winter storms in the Adriatic cut him off completely from all communication with Constantinople. The garrison at Otranto would remain, and the Pasha intended to return after the winter with an even larger army.

Duke Alfonso led his army into Apulia in the early spring of 1481. He was assisted by a force of Hungarian troops that had been dispatched by King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, a longtime foe of the Turks and a monarch eager to deliver them a defeat in Italy. Like the people of Otranto a year before, the Turkish troops retreated to the rebuilt defenses of the city as the Christian army arrived at the gates on May 1. The city was thoroughly invested. The siege of Otranto continued apace for several months, culminating in two large assaults, in August and then September 1481. The city fell with the second attack, but the last vestiges of Otranto were destroyed in the vicious fighting. None of the Ottoman troops were left alive.

The Sacrifice That Saved Italy

While the siege engines of the Neapolitans rained down on the Ottoman defenders, across the Adriatic on May 3, 1481, Sultan Mehmet II the Conqueror died suddenly at the age of 49 at his military headquarters at Gebze, while planning his next war. It was believed that he had been poisoned, perhaps by the Venetians.

Any thought of a relief force sailing from the Ottoman Empire for Italy died with Mehmet, for his heir, Bayezid II, was forced to engage in a bitter struggle with his brother Cem for the throne. Pasha Ahmed fell out of favor at the court and was recalled to Constantinople by Bayezid and imprisoned. On November 18, 1482, the one-time great general was executed at Adrianople.

The Ottoman ambitions in Italy were ended. Had Otranto surrendered to the Turks, the history of Italy might have been very different. But the heroism of the people of Otranto was more than a strategically decisive stand. What made the sacrifice of Otranto so remarkable was the willingness to die for the faith rather than reject Christ.

The martyrs of Otranto were not forgotten by the people who returned to Apulia after the fighting was over. The bones of the martyrs were gathered up, placed in reliquaries, and installed in a chapel just off the main altar in the restored cathedral. Some of the relics were also sent to the church of Santa Caterina in Formello at Naples.

On October 5, 1980, Pope John Paul II visited Otranto and said Mass in honor of the martyrs in the cathedral. Twenty-six years later, in July 2006, Pope Benedict XVI gave his formal approval for the promulgation of a decree by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints that the Martyrs of Otranto were killed out of “hatred for the faith” (in odium fidei) in Otranto on August 14, 1480. This was the formal recognition that they were martyrs.

In speaking of the sufferings of the martyrs of Otranto, Pope John Paul II touched upon the challenges of martyrdom for Christ, but he also stressed the example of the 800 to modern Christians, especially those enduring hardships and sufferings in hostile lands where persecutions and even death are commonplace. He declared,

MANY CONFESSORS AND DISCIPLES OF CHRIST HAVE PASSED THROUGH THIS TEST IN THE COURSE OF HISTORY. THE MARTYRS OF OTRANTO PASSED THROUGH IT 500 YEARS AGO. THE MARTYRS OF THIS CENTURY HAVE PASSED AND ARE PASSING THROUGH IT TODAY, MARTYRS WHO ARE UNAPPRECIATED, OTHERWISE LITTLE KNOWN, AND WHO ARE FOUND IN PLACES FAR AWAY FROM US.